The Ride - Bad Cop Bad Cop (Behind The Scenes Photos!)
I finally got my copy of Bad Cop Bad Cop’s NEW record, The Ride! I just about melted when I got to see this record in person. Oh my GOSH it looks gorgeous!
I am so proud of the work I did with Jennie Cotterill on this shoot! Not only does Jennie sing, play guitar, and write music for Bad Cop Bad Cop, she’s also an incredibly talented painter, sculptor and artist. She and I got super close a few summers ago when we spent 7 weeks traveling together on Vans Warped Tour (her in BCBC, and myself as their photographer).
So earlier this year, I’m hanging out before work one morning and I get a call from Jennie out of the blue and she tells me about this incredible concept she has for the cover of her next record. She was concerned though, because she wanted to build this miniature carnival ride but didn’t know how to photograph the set. I had never photographed miniatures before; but I’m weird, and I love tiny things, so I still felt like this project was made for me! So I told her to start building and I’ll do my research and we’ll pick a date to shoot.
By the time Jennie was finished building the set, we were on a pretty tight timeline before Bad Cop Bad Cop left on their European tour and the album layout had to be submitted. The first time we both had available was on a Wednesday evening in February. The shoot was in my apartment so when I got home from work that day, I cleared everything out of my office at home. Jennie brought a 6 foot pop-up table, some hand-painted backgrounds, her model (duh) and a bag of sand. We dumped that sand on the table and got right to work.
A cute pic Jennie snapped behind the scenes and shared on her Instagram — @JennieCotterill
It was so good to be working with Jennie again. Especially on this project, where we really got to collaborate on the shooting and editing process. Not to mention she’s one of my favorite people to hang out with and we were laughing so much the whole time! The shoot ended up being about 5 hours and my boyfriend was sweet enough to bring us pizza halfway through ♥︎
This is pretty much what our set looked like, unedited. But it wasn’t just cropping and color corrections on this one. That’s actually another reason I’m so proud of this project.
After looking at the images, Jennie realized the cart was a little too big for The Ride. She probably almost had a heart attack getting ready to tell me we needed to reshoot, but I had I feeling I’d be able to fix it in post.
I have very basic photoshop “training”, but I’ve taught myself enough to make graphics for The Real. Plus, a good amount of those projects started with me thinking “how the fuck am I supposed to do THAT?!”
So I told Jennie, “Don’t panic, let me see what I can do”
And I SHRUNK the cart!!! And you wouldn’t even know if I didn’t write this blog, huh?
I also ended up swapping in a different version of the background and a cleaner image of the “THE RIDE” sign. We had shots of each piece individually for the back cover, and they ended up being super useful to get a really nice clean image. I mean this IS for an album cover after all….
So the final image for the cover is saved in 4 layers: The gradient background, THE RIDE sign, The set of the ride with sand, and, the (shrunken) cart!
You can see the differences between the two images below, and see just how much those seemingly small edits made the final image so nice.
The image on the left is straight out of camera and cropped into a square, the one on the right is the final image we used for the cover!
Overall, it was one of my most exciting photography experiences to date. My photos have been printed on album covers before, (and that was exciting too) but there was something so special about creating an image specifically for the album! I got to bring Jennie’s vision to life in a whole set images of her work. Check out the rest of the collection of photos below! These were used for the back cover, interior pages for the vinyl, backgrounds for tour announcements, stuff like that. What I’m trying to say is: hire me to shoot your next album cover and you will get so much great content!!!!
