I had troubles of finding a product I really wanted to shoot. Everything I thought of felt boring and pointless. That is, until I accidentally saw and remembered this donald duckish soft water bottle I got as a part of my birthday present from a friend (since you really want to know: it was a first aid hangover -kit). It’s the kinda thing Donald puts on his bruised head when he’s been beaten up by Daisy, you know.

I did take some ordinary product shots of the soft bottle with a water glass and some painkillers in the background, but they turned out rather boring. Since the assignment was to take four pictures (three portraits and one landscape for doublepage spread) I had planned to combine both typical product shots and pictures of people having the thing on their head. After taking one picture with a person (which didn’t end up on these final four), I immediately scrapped that plan and decided to focus on people. Much more interesting and much more possibilites.

I didn’t want to draw too much attention to the persons themselves, but rather to the situation (and the pain) they’re in. Each picture works by itself, but also as a group. I didn’t have the time to manufacture a logo for the thing and that might be the only gripe I have with these adds. It is quite clear however what the product in these pics is.

Each of these pictures were taken with the same lighting setup, which you can see here:

The main flash was on the right, pointing down on the subject. The highest flash on the left was to provide light for the other side of subject and also to the front. Then one more flash was aimed to the background so that it’d glow white. Some extra spotlights with umbrellas were used especially on the horizontal picture to get rid of annoying shadows.

I gotta admit two of the following shots were happy accidents. I would say something to the person modelling, distracting them for a while and just start shooting. But that is a secret, officially they’re all deeply well-thought beforehand and include some super acting. The grey border is there only so that they wouldn’t blend in with my blog background.

(ISO 100, 1/125, f/14)

(ISO 100, 1/125, f/14)

(ISO 100, 1/125, f/14)

(ISO 100, 1/125, f/14)

(click for a bigger pic)

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)

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.

Being a subscriber of a finnish metal-magazine I knew I could find atleast something in there. Granted, promo-pics of metalbands tend not to vary too greatly and more often than not they cross the border of pure stupidity, but I took my chances anyway. Call it good luck or pure angelic carma, but I found exactly the kinda thing I was looking for at page eight of Inferno #40 (october, 06).

It is not important here, but I’ll say it: in no way I am a fan of My Dying Bride. I like a song or two but other than that I find their music too dull and dragging. And the singer kinda sucks too. That said, I did like the picture of Aaron Stainthorpe (the singer in question) somewhat, and thought it’d be an excellent challenge for me to try and copy it.

As you can see, his face face is underlit in the picture, and shoulders get way more light. That was the starting point for my experiment.

Luckily on the day of the shooting not only had I a model who could sit still for a long periods of time with that worried look on his face, but also two satan’s little helpers, without whom I might have not actually made it. See, getting shoulders lit from both sides was not a problem, and that soft light on the face was doable as well. It was all three lights together that formed a problem. Either there was not enough light on Eppu’s face, or there was too much light on his hair or (when all the other problems were solved) on his groin area. Nothing wrecks a doom-metal picture like a shining crotch. Here’s a picture to show the problem I had with Eppu’s radiant hair.

My two helpers did an amazing job of holding pieces of paperboard (?) and blocking some of the light from both sides, still keeping the shoulders and arms well lit. The third light – this one with an umbrella – I placed in front of my model, further back than the sidelights and a little to the side (right from me) so that it’d form shadows on the left side of Eppu’s face.

Finally after a lot of moving the lights around and trying to position the paperboard-blockers perfectly, I started to get results and one of the last pics I took was already really close to the original one (lighting-wise):

It was taken with 1/30 shutter speed and the biggest aperture available (f/4.2). I opened the raw-picture in photoshop and tried to get the tones match the original picture. I raised the shadow-level and found out that auto -white balance did a good enough job, then dropped saturation a bit and was nearly done. I only cheated a bit when I darkened the knees with burn-tool, since the legs in the original are almost non-existing. I then cropped the picture to match the composition and tinkered with color-balance because of the greenish tint of the picture in the magazine. I might’ve overdone the green a little, but the tone of the picture I scanned doesn’t quite match the magazine – and I still like the picture (minus the skintone which I couldn’t get to match the original).

Here’s the final pic with a thumbnail-reminder of the original.

Being a fool for creepy images and horror movies, I wanted to create something of that sort, if only without too much time on hand. I already had a blossoming attachment to the little red traffic light (the focal lenght -task), so I knew I wanted to include it in the picture. I gave my red hoody to another mate Peter and set Jere kneeling in an uncomfortable position in the foreground while giving directions to the red one and finding a right position for camera (which in the end was really low, shooting upwards, to get all three objects in the same frame). Using wide aperture (f/5.6 with 1/10 shutter speed) I created a blurry background – quite a textbook trick in horror.

My only gripe is the position of my dear red light. I composed it a bit too left and it just doesn’t seem to have enough breathing space there. I adjusted the white balance of the picture afterwards and slightly altered the shadow levels too, to give it more colder and sinister look. As before, the final pic is the first one, and the unedited the latter.

PIC # 1

Yes. It is a red traffic light. Shooting it with wide angle provides very little emotional thrills. I like tones of the pic, though. Here you see a lot of the background and the enviroment the little light has to survive in. I wanted the background to be sharp in both pics, so I shot them with tripod using the smallest possible aperture. For this wide angle shot it ment f/22 with 3 seconds exposure time.

PIC # 2

Using the tele-end of the zoom lens but keeping the object the same-sized as in the previous pic ment taking many steps away from the traffic light. As the background tightened and perspective compressed the image got a little more ooomph to it. It now feels nicely tight and better composed than the first one. And I still like the color tones. This one was originally shot with f/36 and 5, but I had to tinker with the exposure and white balance of the raw-pic in Photoshop to get the tones match with the first pic. I also cropped the picture just a little bit to make it look better. The unedited version is (obviously) the second one.

You could make the range of depth of field more apparent by using zoom, but for this task I chose not to just because I liked these following pics I took with wide lens.

PIC # 1

Here you can see Jere in a garage with blurred background. For portraits it’s quite common to use zoom, like I said, so that the object stands out better. Using wide lens here made these pics look a little less portraity and brough some life into them (I think). It also underlined a bit the symmetrical composition I was aiming for.

This one was shot with 1/15 shutter speed (perfectly good for people standing still, if you’re using a tripod) and the biggest possible aperture (f/3.5). Both pictures are shot with ISO 100, to avoid any unwanted digital crap in them.

PIC # 2

Changing from the biggest possible aperture to the smallest (f/22) ment longer exposure time. Luckily for my model here, the shutter speed was only 2 seconds (I on the other hand had to stand still for good 8-10 seconds in his picture. It isn’t easy!). As you can see, the background is perfectly in focus and sharp. I prefer the first picture, but the choice has nothing to do with the funky expression on Jere’s face in this one.