For the Palm Springs Life August cover shoot and accompanying bathing suit feature, photographer Fredrik Brodén and I decided to keep things simple and shoot our concept at my house at the top of Cathedral Cove.
The house is contemporary and the pool is new: How hard could it be to get some kind of crane in there to shoot an overhead shot?
The morning of the shoot, a local rental company delivered a 3-ton, 17-foot motorized scissor crane. It operates from a hand-held box, something like a gigantic Hot Wheels. The plan was to take it through the garage and out the rear door to the pool deck.
But the rental guy didn’t have the specs quite right on the crane. It was 2 inches too wide for the doorway. Fredrik and our model, Alizee Gaillard, arrived. Ailizee, who grew up driving tractors on a farm in Switzerland, offered to maneuver the crane. We realized that it would fit easily through the front double doors. The distance from the foyer to the sliding glass doors to the pool area is one of the narrowest parts of the house so it seemed like we risked the least damage to the house by traveling the shortest distance between two points.
We guided the behemoth machine carefully into the house, narrowly avoiding the baby grand piano and the monkey chandelier (don’t ask) as I prayed that my wife didn’t come home unexpectedly and discover several tons of rusty, oily, rental yard machinery traversing her travertine tile. Just as the crane reached middle of the tight space, Alizee announced that the head of the sliding door was too low to accommodate the crane.
The crew arrived, and everyone had a different solution. The situation was turning from photo shoot into photo scrum. Full blown panic was imminent.
Then Fredrik, the cool- headed Swede, suggested calling the rental yard. It sent a technician who dismantled the metal basket;, and with inches to spare, we muscled the crane into the backyard.
Though not a fan of heights, Fredrik captured some breathtaking images of Alizee gliding diagonally underwater. I’d never felt so proud of my pool.
Removing the crane involved the whole disassembly/assembly process once again. We parked it in the garage for the rental company to fetch later, tidied up the yard, and tossed my makeshift plywood ramps behind the garage and generally tidied up to erase all evidence of our domestic drama.
The next morning Emily and I were drinking coffee at our dining table when a quizzical look crossed her face. “I know this will sound odd,” she said, “But it looks like a car skidded across the dining room floor.”
PHOTO BY JEN MARTENS
Photographer Fredrik Brodén (blue shorts) positions the crane for a shot.
