How I created the LE52Weeks-9: CD Cover

LE52Weeks-9: CD Cover, originally uploaded by Jon W. Howson.

The specifics for this assignment was as follows:

The music group is a String Quartet. The music they are playing is this piece:

String Quartet in F, By Maurice Ravel

This image will be a square... as CD's are square.

You have two options:
1. Musical instrument on location. (Violin, Viola, Cello)
2. Musician with instrument on location

Yes, I know most of you do not have a spare cello sitting around for a prop... So we will make a third option:

3. Get creative... How would you make a CD cover without a quartet, or the instruments? I can think of a few ways... can you?

How I approached the shot

I knew just before the deadline for this assignment that I would be attending a residential orchestral weekend away so I knew that I had access to a number of instrument and players. I choose to work with a cellist that I had worked with before, and decided to go for a close in shot of the instrument with the idea that it could imply any of four instruments within a string quartet.

I decided to approach the shot with a single light source to have a dark and mysterious feel to the image. To narrow done the beam of light from my off camera flash I decided to go with a black straws snoot grid with the aim of targeting the light solely around the bridge area of the cello. The resulting shot is as seen below.



From here it was a matter of selecting a crop, obviously square, and then processing it in photoshop. The part where the image really started to come alive with more contrast and bringing out the colours was when I converted the image from the colour mode of RGB to LAB. From here I chose to apply the image, changing the blending mode to Soft Light and experimented with the different channels. Finally a text layer was applied to complete the CD cover.

What do you think to the final result? How would you have done things differently if given the same assignment?

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