"I do shoot in the studio, but I love working on location, particularly when it's outside," says Klaus Thymann, who grew up among the great outdoors of Norway and who is now one of London's leading fashion and advertising shooters.

"It really adds to your picture, and it's more fun. You can't control everything so it forces you to be creative in ways you don't anticipate. I like the spontaneity, and being outside puts everyone in a good mood. Sometimes it's hard work, like when I've done shoots in London in unremitting rain for four days. But as the photographer, I'm like the director of the shoot, so it's up to me to motivate everyone else. I have to be the first one to put on my anorak and get out there, and that's something I really enjoy."

One of his most recent commissions was for i-D, shot in two locations in Los Angeles, on the coast and in the Californian woods. Inspired by outdoor festivals and tribal culture, the story has an easy going aesthetic and sense of fun that belies the rigorous planning that went into making it.

"We originally planned to do one location per day, but then we found out a big storm was coming in so we had to do both in one day," he says. "There was a lot to get done, but because we were very well prepared we weren't finding out what we were doing, we were just executing it. I like to run very disciplined shoots."

Thymann has worked with i-D for five years, and his initial meeting was with Terry Jones, the legendary editor-in-chief and creative director who founded the magazine in 1980. "I go in to see them every season and present some ideas for fashion stories, and based on that they turn [what they like] into a commission," he explains.

"They'll tell me which aspects they like and which they don't until we come up with something together. My work is always based on ideas - I don't like to reference other photographers' work, because I don't want to do anything derivative."

For his latest commission he worked with fashion editor and long-term collaborator Adam Howe on the nuts and bolts of the shoot (in particular, on which clothes will go where), then set his team of scouts to work on finding a good location.

Intended for i-D's April issue, the shoot needed a summery feel that was impossible to achieve in still wintry Britain, so Thymann decided to do it in LA, and managed to time it to coincide with a commercial shoot for Sony Ericsson.

His team came up with two ideal locations, Cedar Grove, a wood in Griffiths Park, and the Pyramid Lake, at LA National Park. Both looked appropriately remote, but both are actually just a short drive from the big city. "I don't want to shoot in the middle of nowhere - you'll spend half your time driving there, and if anything goes wrong you're stuck," says Thymann.

City of Angels
He regularly works in LA, so he got his team of preferred stylists, hair and make-up artists and assistants together and set them to work casting the models for the shoot. His US agent, AFG Management, negotiated the appropriate permissions, while he flew over with his first assistant, who accompanies him on all his shoots.

They went straight to the location to check it out, scouting the area in depth and planning exactly what they would shoot where, taking reference shots along the way. Thymann is nothing if not meticulous - he even has a piece of software that tells him where the sun will be in the sky (a big feature in this story). He's also tries to avoid shooting images that won't be used in the final story.

"There are different pieces of clothing in each shot, and some of those pieces are important for the magazine to include [because of their advertising]," he says. "If I start wanting to lose shots I make it difficult for them. I work closely with Adam, and we usually shoot about eight pages."

In total, there were nearly 20 people on set, but Thymann still tried to keep things as minimal as possible. He uses mostly natural light with a little flash and, unusually these days, shoots film with a Hasselblad. Using a digital back tethered to a laptop is more trouble than it's worth outside, he says, plus he needs to work fast to get the shots in ever-changing conditions.

It also means he can get away without a generator (although this time they needed one for a smoke machine), and shooting 6×6 also affords some flexibility in the edit, as the images can be cropped to fit either landscape or portrait slots.

In the end, the weather held for the extra day, allowing for further shots, but most of the story was captured on day one. The extra work to make that happen in a shorter time frame was worth the effort, especially now they've been chosen to go on show at a trendy boutique store in New York's Lower East Side, part of a wider exhibition on his work with Howe.

Together they've shot stories on tightrope walkers in Norway, taekwondo experts in Brazil and totem pole dancers in California and, says Thymann, somewhere along the line he started to think of the commissions as elements of one long project.