BillyBonkers interview

We peak into the creative portfolio of BillyBonkers, a dynamic duo working in Norway. Christine Aas and Dag Standal paired up in the late ’90s to combine their knowledge of photography and retouching. After a succesful year of self-promotion and taking on assignments in London, they packed up their bags and crossed the continent. Dag takes pleasure in telling us more of the BillyBonkers’s Photoshop style.

How do you create a strong HDR imaging effect that gives your artwork so much detail?
By breaking down the image into several pieces we get tremendous control over the tonal range. It all starts with photographing the background, fine tuning the different pieces and pasting them together in Photoshop. Always using a wide range of exposures. Then we photograph the models (or objects) in the studio with the best available lighting equipment, mainly Broncolor. Shooting on a Hasselblad H4D-50 we control the contrast in order to have the best conditions to take it a step further in Photoshop. After all the images have been shoot the time comes to put it all together into one image, often containing 30-50 layers.

Why is such a large portion of your portfolio focused on sports?
An interest for sport photography came to us when a couple of years ago we helped our local football club. We made individual pictures of all the players. Discovering that the lighting equipment could freeze movements down to 1/7000 of a sec. made us quite intrigued. Having the pictures in our portfolio recruited more assignments for other sports-related customers.

Any tips on working successfully as a freelancer?
In order to make it as a freelancer I think you have to develop a distinct style and keep improving and developing it all the time. Having your work displayed at different societies like Behance Network, Flickr, Facebook, or One Eyeland, is a good idea. Art buyers constantly need to be reminded of your ability.

How long do you spend in Photoshop at any given time, and why?
We do all of the retouching ourselves. It can take from 1 day to several days when retouching an image to perfection. Sometimes we send the images to Clipping Images to have them masked, but it always takes a few hours to fine-tune a mask to seamlessly make it blend into an image.

How do you see your style evolving through 2012?
It is difficult to guess how the style of BillyBonkers will evolve throughout the year. We will keep improving both the skills in photography and Photoshop by exploring the great work produced by other artist, tutorials and workshops.