Behind the Scenes with Herpa Wings: Aircraft Models for Your Inner AvGeek
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APEX went behind the scenes with Herpa at their showroom in Santiago, Chile to capture the delicate details of their beautiful aircraft models up close for our “Mighty Models” feature in The Entertainment Issue, written by Howard Slutsken. Frits de Kleine, lead architect and mastermind behind the model airport, is pictured below carefully arranging his creation for its APEX close-up.
APEX Media art director Nicolas Venturelli and graphic designer Eva Dorsch were on location to oversee the production – here’s what Venturelli had to say about how this shoot came together:
“While doing image research for the feature, we found out that Herpa (one of the biggest distributors) had a showroom in Chile. Eva, our graphic designer, contacted them and they immediately offered their whole fleet to our disposal. So we thought it was a great opportunity to organize a photoshoot for the magazine.
On our first scouting day, we arrived to a very quiet street where Frits de Kleine and Claudio Gonzalez Brstilo were waiting for us in their Herpa uniforms. Frits is an architect from the Netherlands who has been living in Chile for 5 years, and his partner Claudio is a visual artist. They have been selling Herpa models for about 4 years, and have had this storefront since 2013. The showroom is inside a house in Providencia, which also functions as the workshop where they build airport models for Herpa that are distributed worldwide. They have more than 100 aircraft models in their store, plus five different airport models, as well as accessories. To get to the showroom you need to pass through their backyard, and we thought it looked like a great location for the photoshoot we were planning.
They offered to set a whole airport up for us, trying to recreate a scene as close as possible to reality. It would take almost half a day to build it, so we decided to meet again in a week.
We arrived to the showroom on a sunny autumn afternoon and everything was ready. We were joined by photographer Sebastián Utreras, who has been working on editorial content for more than 13 years.
We started shooting photos of details, with very short depth of field, to emphasize the fact that we were portraying a miniature. Hands were also very important to show the scale that we were working on, so we put our own hands in the picture! To make the aerial image that opens the article we had to move the model to the floor that was covered with autumn leaves. Our biggest challenge was to make the poses natural, avoid our clothes reflecting on the airport ceiling, and of course leaving space for our headline within the image frame.
The photos ended up looking just how we wanted, showing the magnitude of the airport that was assembled especially for the pages of APEX Experience.”
Read “Mighty Models” in The Entertainment Issue of APEX Experience.
Looking for your next aircraft model fix? Grab this Amsterdam Airport Bus set or shop countless models from Herpa here.