APERTURE: F/5,6

SHUTTER SPEED: 1/90 SEC

CAMERA: HASSELBLAD X1D-50C

FOCAL LENGTH: 45MM (XCD 3,5/45)

© Daniel Rueda and Anna Devís

What made you become the photographers you are today?

Finding each other. It may sound cheesy, but that doesn’t make it any less true! Before we started working together, we had very different approaches to photography. Due to Daniel’s background in architecture, he began his career as an architectural photographer, which is a very technical type of photographer. Taking beautiful pictures of buildings and structures is all about light, geometry and composition and not so much about the story and/or the creativity of the images. On the other hand, Anna has always been a very creative being. She has been working with her hands since she was a child. Always looking for the right medium to tell her story, besides being an architect, she actually used to be a painter and illustrator too! Her works were filled with the color and humor that Daniel always lacked. The combination of our two very different approaches is what makes our work the way it is. The funny thing is that we are not only bringing to the table what we know how to do best, but we are also constantly learning from each other on how to improve in the areas we are not so comfortable in.

What does the X System camera do for your photography?

Honestly, everything! We found Hasselblad's X System at a point in our careers when our previous camera couldn’t keep up with our demands anymore. Getting into fine art photography, we felt like we had outgrown full frame cameras, but at the same time medium format photography seemed to be a dauntingly large jump for us! We believed larger format cameras were heavier and more difficult to set up. Luckily for us, the X1D-50c proved us wrong. So much so that we can no longer picture ourselves working with a different system!

Tell us the story behind how you created your image.

The concept of teamwork is rooted in our DNA. I don’t think we would be able to do on our own what we are doing together, and we wanted to illustrate that with an image. Lightbulbs have always been associated with the symbol of ideas, and since brainstorming is such an important part of our process, we visualized this couple in white fixing a lamp together that they would not be able to reach without each other. As always, once we agreed on the idea, Anna drew several sketches of the image we had in mind. With each one of her drawings we make decisions that will help us bring these concepts to life later on, such as posing style, outfit selection, location type and shooting time, among many other things. The latter is one of the most crucial decisions we have to make due to the fact that all of our work is done using natural light alone. We usually create these scenes without manipulating the image afterwards so, in order not to run out of light while making this one, we had to carefully plan and build the set as quickly as possible, using only pink paper, some tape and lots and lots of patience!