A look at Danny Kleinman's recent epic nautical tale for Smirnoff, "Sea", makes one think the shoot must've had its share of challenges. After all, this is a spot where the world's oceans barf up hundreds of years' worth of detritus. Ask the spot's DP, 42-year-old Alwin Kuchler, what the biggest obstacle was, and he'll have a surprising answer.

"The biggest challenge was telling everybody we had to go out on a stinking fishing boat at 3:30am to get the early sunlight for the shot," he says with a laugh from London. "You don't like to call people in that early and then have them wait around for an hour."

Turns out that the Düsseldorf-born Kuchler is big on teamwork. Collaborating with a friend in Munich on a school film project ushered him into the world of filmmaking. After working as a runner for a Munich-based production company, he headed to the UK in 1990 for a stint at the National Film and Television School. His reasons for staying in the UK weren't entirely professional - it was where he met his wife.

In 1999, a stroke of good fortune came with the release of NFTS schoolmate Lynne Ramsay's critically-acclaimed Ratcatcher, Kuchler's first feature as a DP. International commercial notice began with Frank Budgen's "Sofa" for Reebok in 2001, in which a jilted sofa wages war against a couch potato trying to escape its comfy clutches. The spot earned him a Best Cinematography nomination at the 2002 BTAA Craft Awards, an award he'd win in 2004 for Chris Palmer's "A Life in a Day" for Volkswagen.

Repped by The Gersh Agency in the US and PFD in the UK, Kuchler's CV stacks features like Danny Boyle's "Sunshine" next to some of the best spot work from Budgen, Kleinman, Dougal Wilson, Nick Gordon and Ringan Ledgwidge. He's always keen to experiment, whether it's pulling out a hand-crank for a test during a recent JC Penney shoot with Wilson (the footage wasn't used, to Kuchler's chagrin), or taping together lens pieces to get a fractured look for Budgen's Mercedes mind-bender, "Space to Think".

Still, Kuchler prefers the dynamic of the performance spot, citing working with Ledwidge and the cast on Levi's "Dangerous Liaison" as a highlight. "With post-production jobs, it involves a lot of craft - thinking through what the lighting would be if there was a huge object in the shot that isn't there at the time," he says. "I tend to be more inspired by human faces and people."

The Gersh Agency http://www.gershagency.com
PFD http://www.pfd.co.uk