Palmolive pre production shoot
23.04.09
Like every year the Palmolive Group sponsors the World Cup in St. Peter Ording / Germany with one of their brands. It was Gard 2 years ago and Colgate last year it is Palmolive this year. In order to work professionally and to have enough pictures during the world cup (as in Germany there might be no wind for a few days, you never know) and also for advance media productions, a pre production shooting is necessary – and for this reason we went to El Gouna / Egypt this year. “We” includes the incredible sports photographer Michael Kunkel (usually shoots Formula 1, Soccer and so on) and assistant production Manager Sven Kaatz from 9pm Media and as riders Rick Jensen and myself.
El Gouna gave us a warm welcome and we were picked up from the Airport with the Limousine service and checked into the Steigenberger Hotel. After we had all gotten the chance to indulge ourselves in the warm pool and our beautiful apartments with a view onto the lagoon, we had a first meeting with the El Gouna marketing to discuss our possibilities for shooting and to make a general plan.
The next morning we found ourselves at the beach early for our first action shoot. The forecast looked like we would get wind for the first 2 days and then have no wind for the last 2 days of our stay, so we had to make sure to shoot all the action we needed quickly. With a good team and professional work this was no problem and 1.5 days and 5 action sessions later we had everything we needed before the wind really died on us.
Now the lifestyle and beauty shooting was about to start. In the briefing it stated that we needed beauty shots of both Rick and I and some pictures that looked like fun on the beach!
On top of that we wanted to get some typical Egypt pics for the “making of” story and some pics that show the beauty of El Gouna. That kept us busy for the next 2 days but was a lot of fun at the same time. We got to discover El Gouna in a different way… went to visit the amazing yachts in the Marina, went up on the hill and the golf club tower to have a beautiful aerial view and spend more hours at the beach and in the water to get some fun pictures.
With us having our shoot finished I even managed to visit the Girls Camp held by was Kiteboarding.de in El Gouna at the same time and happy to see that they were having a great time, kiting every day and making big progress. All the girls were super nice and very interested in getting to know a bit about my pro life, competitions and of course more kiting!
After a little Q&R with the whole group we had a nice lunch together right at the beach and then the time had already come for me to pack my things and leave for Australia again.
All in all it was a long trip (from Australia to Egypt and back) for a short time but the production was successful, I got to catch up with some kite chicks and it was totally worth it!
