Thomas Kettner, a Munich-based photographer working for Sports 2000, brought us a brief that needed two contrasting visual worlds. Gritty industrial environments with architectural weight, alongside dramatic natural landscape. He had Scotland in mind. We had a specific answer.
Glasgow plus the Isle of Skye. On paper they're opposites: one a post-industrial city with a character no studio can fake, the other the most cinematically dramatic coastline in Europe. Together they gave the campaign a visual range that doesn't exist in one place anywhere else on the continent. Thomas agreed. Planning started immediately.
Highland reel · Sports 2000 campaign.
Securing the right locations in Glasgow takes more than a recce and a phone call. The desk obtained filming permissions at the SECC and the Armadillo, landmark architectural venues that aren't routinely available to commercial productions. That gave the industrial sequences the scale and weight the brief demanded.
The Kelpies came next, and drone permits across Glasgow city centre. City-centre airspace authorisation in the UK requires coordinated CAA applications, liaison with air traffic control, and precise flight windows. It is a process that takes time and experience to navigate without delaying the shoot.
Knowing Scotland's weather, the desk also sourced a yoga studio immediately adjacent to unit base. When it rained, and it did, the cover space was already agreed, budgeted and ready to shoot. That kind of contingency doesn't appear in the photography. It appears in the schedule staying intact.
Urban reel · Sports 2000 campaign.
Skye operates on its own terms. Micro-climates mean conditions can shift within a single valley in under an hour. What is true on the west coast in the morning may be entirely different by afternoon. There is no point pretending otherwise.
Every evening, Thomas and the production reviewed the following day's forecast together and built a plan. A, B, C, and D, so that whatever conditions emerged, the team had a location and creative approach ready to go. On days the Quiraing was buried in cloud, we were somewhere else, making images that only existed because of the weather, not despite it.
Every single day of the Skye leg delivered something. The combination of preparation and flexibility meant difficult conditions became part of the visual language of the campaign rather than a problem to solve.
The production was large and fast-moving. A crew of approximately twenty, with between two and four models on set at any time. Crew and cast composition changed right up to the last days of pre-production, not unusual on large campaigns, but it requires accommodation, transport and logistics to remain genuinely flexible rather than nominally flexible.
On Skye in season, quality accommodation books months ahead. The desk managed bookings that stayed changeable and on budget throughout, renegotiating and restructuring as crew numbers shifted. When changes came at the last moment, we adjusted without financial penalty.
Weather monitoring started weeks before anyone flew into Edinburgh. Thomas was kept updated on developing conditions and forecast data was translated into practical location decisions, so that by the time we arrived on Skye, the production was already working from an informed position rather than improvising from scratch.
The combination of Glasgow's industrial weight and Skye's raw landscape drama gave Sports 2000 a visual range you cannot manufacture anywhere else in Europe.
Three weeks. Two entirely different environments. A large crew. Changeable everything. What came back was some of the most striking sportswear photography we've been involved with. The campaign delivered the exact tonal range Sports 2000 needed: architectural and human in Glasgow, elemental and vast on Skye.
It is a project that shows what's possible when production is understood as creative problem-solving rather than logistics management. Every contingency plan, every accommodation renegotiation, every weather-driven location decision fed directly into the quality of the final images.
The UK makes work like this possible. Knowing the UK makes it reliable.