Shooting a National Billboard Campaign for Anytime Fitness

Seeing your photos tower over traffic on a billboard campaign in New Zealand is epic. Most of my work usually lives on phones, laptops, or the occasional magazine page. But it's definitely a cool feeling seeing it on the big screen in multiple cities!

This one came through Daymark, an Auckland-based agency I had been keen to work with. We kicked things off with a Teams call that brought the CEO, the agency, and myself together to align on the vision. The direction was clear: celebrate the brand’s tagline, Anybody, Anywhere, Anytime, with imagery that felt bold, approachable, and billboard-ready.

Anybody. Anywhere. Anytime. Mount Maunganui

Shooting For Scale

Billboard photography has its own rules. You only have a few seconds of someone’s attention as they drive past, so the images need to be bold, clean, and instantly readable. That meant thinking about:

• Negative space so the creative team had room to add text without cluttering the frame

• Lighting in darker gym environments, balancing natural shadows with flashes to keep everything punchy. Shout out to Keepa for loaning me his scrim! I also used my 600d that I'd recently picked up from Photogear.

• Lens choice: Because I knew shooting in a gym can be on the darker side (depending on what corner), I knew I wanted to shoot with a shallower depth. Not so shallow that I'd lose too much detail, especially with multiple subjects, but fast enough to give me a more flexibility without pumping up the ISO too much. Obviously de-noising has come a long way so it's not a massive deal anyhow, but I'll always do as much as I can in camera. Massive thank you to Sony NZ for loaning me their 28-70 f2. It was my first time using this and I was wrapped with the image!

• Following the brief: Always important! There's always a bit of "going-off-script" as these aren't generally hard and fast rules, but it's important to have regular comms with the agency to make sure you're both on the same page. They have a vision, and it's our jobs as photographers to bring that too life.

The Brief

1. Highlight people training individually and with a trainer, focusing on diversity (3x talent and Ix trainer, ideally capturing a range of different ages, gender, fitness levels). A key focus on strength training.

   
   

2. Ensure that the gym and the quality of equipment, facilities and finishes is captured throughout the photos. We want each image to look overtly like a gym. Where possible, capture Anytime Purple in the images.

   
   

3. Capture the Anytime Fitness technology in-use, this includes the app (first priority), members using their phone to access to the gyms, members using the app in-gym for workouts and logging progress, e-vault, body scanners and other tech-based equipment on offer within the gym

The Challenge at St Johns

Anytime’s brand colours are unapologetically bold, all about that purple. Having shot at other gyms before, I knew a lot of them had purple flooring in the functional spaces. My plan was to lean into that and build the branding naturally into the shots.

The catch? The shoot location, Anytime Fitness St Johns in Auckland, had its functional space tucked into a room with zero natural light. My goal from the start was to keep the images light, bright, and friendly (steering away from anything moody) and to avoid that over-produced “lit” look. Unfortunately, in this space it was too tricky. We had no choice but to fully light the scene.

That required some quick pivoting. I jumped on a call with the agency and CEO just to give them the heads-up. In the end, we made it work and even found creative angles, like using the striped flooring to capture extra content for social media and web photography.

Photography is always about thinking on your feet, especially when you are running on a limited window without the chance to fully scout beforehand. Despite the challenges, the fitness brand campaign photography turned out great.

Real People, Real Energy

Another big part of the brief was diversity. Anytime Fitness wanted the campaign to reflect the friendly and inclusive community their gyms are known for. I was responsible for organising the talent, making sure we had a mix of people who felt approachable and relatable. On the day, it was less about staged poses and more about capturing genuine moments: people smiling mid-set, cheering each other on, and showing the supportive energy that makes the gym feel welcoming.

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From Screen to Skyline

Once the shoot wrapped, it was all about finishing strong in post. High contrast, bold colours, and images designed to cut through the visual noise of a busy street. Delivering the final files knowing they would be plastered on billboards across Auckland and beyond was a buzz like no other.

Looking Back

This campaign reminded me that whether it is a local brand shoot or a nationwide billboard campaign, the process is the same: capture authenticity, plan for the medium, and create images that make people stop, or in this case slow down at the lights, and feel something.