Yeehaw!
If you haven’t yet read the plans I had for album cover pictures, read below (the research part).
My mate – a real guitarist – has a tiny flat which is perfect for the kind of pictures I wanted to take, so obviously I headed there. Aiming for Tapestry -like cover (also below) I told him to sit on his window ledge and smoke continuosly. He didn’t seem to bother.
As it was rather bright outside, compared to the flat, and since I didn’t have any huge extra lights with me (I am a poor student after all) I decided to rely only on natural light on this one. I wanted to get the exposure on the opposite houses right, but still have his face somewhat visible. Had to compromise a little, ofcourse, but I think the picture turned out nice.
I cropped it to a square and added some extra noise on Photoshop, to get that 70′s feeling – and did so actually to all of the following pictures.
(ISO 200 – since that’s the lowest on Nikon D70 – 1/6, f/16)
For the back cover I wanted something totally different, since the booklet pictures were going to be these atmospheric, moment capturing artist -shots. After seeing my friends stove I immediately decided to add an element of dirty realism to the cover, and in someway to balance the overall mood of the album so that it wouldn’t seem to just glorify the suffering artist -myth. Plus obviously the shape and colors resembles LP’s, which was more than suitable for the whole thing. Since the light was low on that kitchen corner, and I had to shoot handheld because of the akward position, I had to come up with a plan. In the end I managed to light the thing holding a normal, small househould lamp in my left hand and clicking away with the right one. Turned out just fine.
(ISO 200, 1/60, f/4.5)
The back cover of the booklet, I thought, should be somewhat simple yet something that would add information about the album and/or the artist. I told our artist in question to sit on his bed, under the beam of the ceiling light and play guitar. I then proceeded to find a good angle to catch both the man and the light behind the curtains. I focused on the bed post far back to get the front blurry. Because of the light, I had to shoot this with a tripod and keep telling my guitarist there not to play so damn fast, so that there’d be just the right amount of blurriness in him and no disappearing hands.
(ISO 200, 1/3, f/4.5)
Having all the necessary information in three pics (the artist, what he does, the mood and the dirty stove) I knew the double page inside the booklet wouldn’t need to bring anything more to the mix, except for keeping the atmosphere consistent. I decided to go back to the front cover and have a different take on that, so I shot the troubled artist with a tele-end of the lens and focused on the houses on the opposite side. Keeping in mind this was going to be a folded image and twice the width of the cover, I composited the pic so that both the closed and the open window would be on separate pages, the left one having the guy. (click for a larger image)
(ISO 200, 1/100, f/4.5)
