Dark Wainer had essentially no budget to create the cover for his CD- "The Blues: Future Past." The upshot of this was that Studio Dual owner John Etnier became a photographer for a day. Mr. Wainer had the idea of using his daughter, niece and nephew posed with an old guitar and amplifier . We decided to shoot at the kid's grandfather's house, partly for familial continuity and also because the house has a nice "vintage" feel to it.
ASA 160 tungsten transparency film was used, with a small flash mounted on the camera. (The film was "pushed" in processing.) For a few photos the flash was "bounced" off the ceiling. This turned out to be a mistake, because of insufficient light. Of course, of the 72 exposures, the kids came off the best on one of the images from the "bounced flash" series. We had it scanned, and it came back looking like this:
The scatter proof, which previews what an image will look like when it's actually printed, revealed that the image was too dark to recover by conventional means. The flesh tones were indistinguishable from colors of the shelving and amplifier behind them. There was almost no dynamic range in these areas: the flesh had a "flat", metallic look. The photo appeared unusable.
Serendipitous fooling around saved the day, however. The panel below shows the four-step process that turned the picture around.
- The picture was "solarized" (note the odd green color the light near Cory's leg has taken on.)
- The image was lightened.
- The color balance was subtly shifted.
- Selective filtering was used to brigthen and add other enhancements to the image.
This process, however, exaggerated a problem in the original scan- the scanning operator had apparently hand-drawn a very rough area around the figures, to isolate their images for contrast work.
The manipulation we performed above revealed this work much more starkly. The problem was corrected by "painting in" sampled images of the purple bedspread.
Here's the finished cover:
Another serindipitous "mistake" during the photo session also served to make a better cover shot.
The camera had an attached, hinged lens cap. The mount for this cap is soa large that it enters the picture when the lens is used in its widest-angle mode (approx 75mm). This creates a "vignette" effect that appears in the corners of the photo.
The vignetting worked wonderfully, however. The area of the photo we would use for the CD cover left a substantial unused vignetted area off to the left. That vignette was merged to a dark background. The background ties together the credit text and the guitar/amp collage which appear on the back cover of the CD booklet (the cover [above] continues to the right of this image):
was chosen to illustrate the back panel (the CD tray card):
