One Red Balloon
image © Bret Doss, All Rights Reserved
The constraint was at once simple and complex: anything I wanted to do, as long as it contained a single red balloon. Freedom to be creative, with a single requirement. Sometimes that much leeway can make things more difficult, as narrowing down to something specific means eliminating a number of interesting possibilities.
I sketched out around two dozen concepts, and settled in on the ones with the single red balloon amongst white and black balloons, got the balloons, and secured a helium tank. My favorite sketched idea resulted in the image above. I had given a lot of thought to this concept, including methods to execute it, for many days ahead of the shoot, and this resulted in the set up and shoot time being pretty quick.
I had extra time to shoot, and so changed up the set completely, installing the large sheet of thick, black glass, and exploring ideas using reflections. It was a fun afternoon/evening! I finally set up three balloons as you see in the image below, knew I had the image I wanted. It fully complies with the single red balloon constraint: the reflection is real, not a photoshop manipulation. It was rewarding to create two entirely different images from the simple One Red Balloon concept.
image © Bret Doss, All Rights Reserved
all images/content © Bret Doss, all rights reserved
Seattle Commercial Photographer 
Leave a Reply