Abstract: The National’s 2007 album Boxer focuses on the mechanical feeling of a privileged yet humdrum middle class life: waking up, putting on a shirt and tie, and trudging through your day job. In this series, I designed six album covers for six songs featured on the album. Each cover will follow the lyrical theme of the song it represents as well as maintain the artistic elements from the original cover of Boxer (Picture below).
All pictures (except for Fake Empire) were taken using my iPhone and edited entirely in Photoshop. Each cover includes the band name and song name in proper typography consistent with the original album artwork. Each image has a 6cm wide black bar at the top and bottom where the band name and title are placed respectively.
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Slow Show: This track is mainly about how the only thing the narrator wants to do after a long day of work is go home and drunkenly entertain his wife (hence the title). So to capture those sentiments I took a photo of myself angled to be looking down my dress-pant legs, past the bottle of wine I’m holding, and to my dress shoes.
Production: The original photo was actually taken rightside up, but I decided to rotate it 180 degrees because I felt it gave more of the dizzying feeling associated with being drunk. Next, I wanted to make the floor uniformly tiling, so I used the clone tool to cover up the non-tiled portions of the floor on the edges as well as a piece of toilet paper that got caught in the shot. Next, I used the blur tool to blur each of the four corners in order to create a more fisheyed, dizzying feel to the picture. I also used the clone tool to touch up the shoes. Lastly, I used the black and white adjustment to get the desired coloring, and the curves adjustment to make the pants blacker and shirt whiter to provide a better contrast.
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Mistaken for Strangers: This song explores the feeling of the narrator being unrecognizable to his friends now that he's a working stiff. I wanted to capture the essence of putting on that working-mans disguise by shooting a bunch of products you use to get ready for work. As I expain below, I ended up zooming in on a specific section of a larger scene which included a razor, comb, hair gel, and cleaning product.
Production: The first thing I needed to do for this piece was remove all the logos. I accomplished this by using a combination of cloning tool and paintbrush to cover all the commercial designs as well as the directions on the hair gel. Next I used three adjustments to get the desired coloring: black and white, curves, and brightness/contrast. Once that was complete, I wasn’t very satisfied with the picture. It just looked like a bunch of items on a counter. So I decided so isolate and enlarge a small section of the picture, between the hair gel and razor where the comb lies. I thought it gave the picture a much more interesting feel and kept it that way.
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Guest Room: The original photo used in this image was a shot of a mansion being constructed in my town. For this image I cropped out a specific section of the construction, focusing on the garage of the home where the lights and shadows are most dramatic. Like the "Mistake for Strangers" photo I thought more intrigue was added by zooming in on a specific portion of a larger shot.
Production: After the initial crop of the photo I did some touch up. I used the clone tool to fix up the dirt and grass and get rid of debris as well as fix some of the shadows on the paneling. Next, I used the free select tool to delete the sky and trees behind the house. Afterwards, I used the Black and White image adjustment and Contrast/Brightness adjustment in order to get the desired feel. The lighting above the garage doors was rather bright for a scene was supposed to be only lit by outdoor/moonlight, so I used a a grey paintbrush with low opacity to tone it down. Lastly, the skyline inserted behind the building is a heavily altered picture of clouds lit up by moonlight. I used the clone tool to morph the clouds to my choosing adjusted the brightness/contrast of them.
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Apartment Story: This song comes at a point in the album where the narrator expresses his desire to just spend his days mindlessly relaxing in his apartment with his significant other rather than deal with the stresses of real life. To capture this I enlisted the help of two friends who I photographed in the lounge of my apartment complex as they sat staring at a television screen. I liked the idea that instead of the television being on, you can instead see the man looking at their reflection on the inactive screen.
Production: When taking the photo, I made sure to align the males head at the 1/3 line in order to follow the rule of thirds. Then I wanted to get an angle where you could see three things: the woman’s head resting on his shoulder, the beer in his hand, the television they were watching. An pleasantly unexpected result of this was the reflection of the two onto the television. However, I preferred the reflection cast in another photo form that angle I took. So I cropped that reflection from the other photo and pasted into this one. I then used Auto-tone to make the reflection properly match the lighting of the new photo. Then I did a few minor adjustments to the scaling of the reflection in order to get the perfect fit. Next, I used the clone to make a little adjustment to the man’s facial hair. Last, I used some adjustments to fix the lighting/coloring. Black and White was used to change the coloring. Then I used the Curves adjustment to tone down the bright whites that were coming from the windows. Lastly, I finished with a little Contrast reduction.
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Fake Empire: This was the only piece where I did not use original photography. Credit goes to Phillip Colla for the skyline shot and Hatje Cantz Verlag for the ferris wheel. I came up with the idea for the piece after stumbling upon the original ferris wheel image and falling in love with it. I decided it would be fitting if I placed a city skyline in the distance behind the structure. As a result the image shows an interesting dynamic between an abandoned and dilapidated source of fun (the ferris wheel) and the budding city in the distance.
Production: The original ferris wheel photo was an incredibly wide panoramic shot of a lot of landscape so I cropped it down to feature just the ferris wheel and placed the focal point of it 1/3 of the way into the canvas. To obtain an appropriate skyline, I had to edit out a lot of the original city shot. I used the free select and magic wand tool to deleted all of the sky and mountains that were behind the city shot. I also edited it so the buildings at the left end trailed off to make a more natural ending to the ending of the outskirts of the city. Once I pasted that image into the ferris wheel shot I was faced with the issue of getting the skyline to be behind the wheel. To do this I created a duplicate layer of the section of the ferris wheel which needed to be brought in from of the skyline. Then I deleted all the sky from the image using the magic wand so that only the structure remained, and thus the city skyline would be visible behind it. I then used the clone tool to do some touching up with the grass. Then, I use the clone tool at very low opacity to put some sky over the buildings in order to make it look hazy, as if its very far away. Lastly, I used the black and white adjustment to get the desired coloring, and then used the curve adjustment to tone down the bright white sky.
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Squalor Victoria: The title of this track loosely translates to “filthy triumph” in Latin and refers to the songs narrative about a man who feels in over his head at his job and only puts up the illusion that he’s keeping up/cares. So for this shot I used a friend to model in a shirt and tie and stand in front of a closet full of work clothes in order to capture that feeling of being trapped in the day-to-day routine.
Production: Most of the work done by the framing of the photograph itself and the positioning of the model. The biggest key for me was making sure to line up the model’s tie to be exactly one third of the way in from the right so that it follows the rule of thirds and becomes a focal point of the piece. Once the photo was taken, I first want to change the color of one of the shirts in the background because since it was also white it was blending in with the shirt of the model. To do this I used magic wand/free select to outline the shirt. Then I used the paint bucket with low opacity to fill in the color of the shirt blue while still keeping the creases in the shirt visible. Next, I used the Curve and Bland and White adjustments to get the desired collation effects. Lastly, I made sure to put the lettering of “Squalor Victoria” right below where the tie cuts off in order to draw the eyes down the tie and to the song title.
