Hello again. The spring sun is up and it’d be best for me to try to explain what I’m aiming for in this task.
Album cover. Immediately I think of those cool paintings – and painting like images – and computer graphs that Travis Smith used on all those Anathema and Katatonia (+ many many others) album covers.
(see here: http://www.seempieces.com/gallery.php)
Nope, can’t do ‘em in this task, which is about photographing. The exact opposite springs to mind – those godawful finnish popsinger covers with only the artist and nothing else. Such as this winner:
Wouldn’t be that much of a challenge. Not that I think of myself as a professional, but come on. There’s not a whole lot to look at in this pic, nor does it set anykind of mood for the album – tho it really really tries.
Maybe there is something to be found in these artist pictures anyway. A whole bunch of late 60′s, early 70′s folk and singer-songwriter albums for example have cool covers even if they’re not all that complicated and have the artist(s) posing in them. One dash to my lp-collection (erhm, that’s like 30 of them – I belong to the cd-generation) and I have one of the nicest covers – not to mention albums – of that era in my hand -> Carole King’s Tapestry.
I think I’m on to something. I like the warm and homey (as in: like a home…) feeling of this picture and I’m pretty sure I can find many many more similar covers. I love the non-polished artist-image even if it might have been überpolished back in the days. My y2k-eyes might look at things differently than people back then.
An hour of extensive net-browsing later I had found a few album covers of the 70′s (or late 60′s) that illustrated pretty well the kind of feeling and mood I had begun to have in mind for this project. They all have a natural, or atleast natural looking, light in them. Also they don’t seem to have much else to them at first, but still seem to capture an unique moment or mood on a closer look. And oh! the grain and the color palette of the 70′s.
These would form the guideline for my front cover, but I still gotta shoot the back cover, the back cover of the inlay booklet and the booklet’s interior double page. Don’t think the LP’s back in the days had that many pictures. Maybe I just need to improvise a little.
What I have in my mind now, for the rest of the pics, are all these atmospheric, perhaps a little motion blurred pictures that most of my cd’s of this loose singer-songwriter genre have. Pictures that were taken with a wide aperture, blurry back- and foregrounds. B/W chicks with guitars. Long gazes in to the unknown. You know, such as these (Beth Orton + Missy Higgins x 2):
I’m thinking of a singer-songwriter cd made in, say, 2004 with booklet pictures that were taken by a guy in the 70′s. Yeah. What a concept.
