Year Book cover shoot

This project is thankfully coming to an end and frustratingly this installation has taken far longer to build and shoot than I wanted. This means that Daniel Ross, the photographer that we were told would be doing the photography for the cover is now not available.

This is so frustrating as you can't blame the photographer as he has his own work to do, as do the rest of us. I had done a few rough sketches of what I envisaged the installation shot but no professional photographer to shoot it. A couple of the interdisciplinary guys set up the installation in their studio and set too doing it themselves. I had no problem in them doing the photography if they could get the desired quality we were looking for. Unfortunately, the first shots were too small for the cover and the lens had distorted the images and I just felt the shots were not good enough. This had to be a high impact image that set up the rest of the book.

























Lighting was an issue, and we just felt it was the wrong thing to shoot it in that room with the window and the back boards half way up the image. They were adamant that this is what they wanted but we insisted they reshoot.










The next batch of images were again, not right and we felt that the lecture theatre would have been a better setting, as it would have had a similar space to that of the studio but the light could be controlled much more effectively and the wall space was higher and more consistent. The client was against this idea and would only consider it as a plan b option. I expected a better quality of image from this shoot. Better clarity, better colour and surroundings.

We reshot again on Friday morning with the help of Andy from photography. He was very helpful and replicated the shot the guys had taken the night before but with problems that we had raised from the first two shoots.

This is still not what I envisaged but the shot came out much better than the others.

This is the original shot Andy took.














I tweaked the colour in raw mode on photoshop here










And then removed the imperfections here to clean up the image. Removed that random cable and smoothed off the board.