Keiko Kubo, a renowned artist in ikebana (Japanese flower arranging) was contacted by Tuttle Publishing to create a book illustrating the principles of her craft and presenting a gallery of her creations. When she approached us with the project (nearly two hundred individual photos), we knew it was going to be a huge undertaking and that digital was the only way to bring it off within the budget constraints of the book. It was also an opportunity we couldn't turn down.
The work itself took place over eleven days of shooting spanning three months. Ms. Kubo would arrive at the studio with the day's floral supplies and a fastidiously organized shot list designed to make things go as smoothly as possible.
Working without any layouts, we had to create photos that could run at any size and allowed the publisher's art directors some flexibility in how the photos could be cropped and placed. We had decided on a clean white background to accentuate the simplicity of the designs, lit with a combination of softboxes and some hard accent light. Sequences of arrangements being assembled were shot in reverse order, with the finished design shot first and then gradually dismantled to show the steps that led up to it. This guaranteed continuity.
The shoot was completed ahead of schedule and all images were delivered as a set of fifteen CDs containing ten gigabytes of image data. Keiko's Ikebana will be published by Tuttle in spring of 2005.