Record laying on the floor, with evil flash on

A variation of the flat-on-the-floor technique is the flat-on-the-table technique, see to the right. News alert! Getting the lens perpendicular to the surface is even more difficult when leaning forward over a table, so most aspiring album photogs end up standing beside the table and shooting down at an angle of roughly 60°. I call this the Star Trek Opening Credits effect. Some auction sellers try to pretty-up the flat-on-the table technique with their own variations: flat-on-the-bed or flat-on-an-ugly-quilt. But they fool no one!

One more, shall we?

Ooooo… look! It’s picnic time at the Home for Jaundiced Swingers! Just like you don’t want yellow pictures of real people, you don’t want yellow pictures of the ultra hip people on your incredibly cool record albums. Let this photo be a reminder to match your white balance to your lighting. Use whatever tricks you have up your sleeve: gray cards, controlled lighting, camera presets… just don’t post yellow people to the web!

Some What not to do Rules

First… use a tripod. A tripod will keep your camera steady and, moreover, guarantee that every shot you take is aimed at the exact same point. As you can see above, once the work area and tripod is set, album covers can easily be shuffled in and out of the “studio” without having to recompose every shot. Point. Focus. Click. Guess what? You’ve built a very large scanner! And as long as each cover is placed in the exact same spot, you’ll get a perfect photo every time.

Next, let’s take a closer look at the work area.

I use a pair of black mats to act as a backdrop (Hey! You could use a large grey card to later calibrate the white balance! How about that?) and base. The base mat serves two purposes: one, there is a hash marked on the left side to indicate where the edge of each album is to be placed, and; two, it eliminates reflections from glossy covers.

Though you can’t see it in the photo, the background mat is propped up using a standard metal library bookend, which also serves to hold the cover as vertical as possible. Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty good at balancing album covers a hair’s breadth from the tipping point, but here’s a nice tip for insuring that your covers remain vertical: use a second bookend placed near the right edge of the album and secure the cover with a paperclip placed just inside the back cover, like so:

Setting the album cover at a nice 90° vertical angle is essential to eliminating many of the perspective problems we saw in the set of “bad cover shots.” Up and down perspective becomes skewed as your camera moves below or above the album’s vertical centerline, while left and right skewing is introduced as the camera moves right or left of the horizontal center. Basically, you want your lens to be square to the very center of the album cover, which in most cases is 12 ³⁄₈ inches square. Think you can eyeball these dimensions? Don’t kid yourself! The eye and the brain are funny things that frequently agree on matters of perspective. But until you get your carefully eyeballed photos before the rigid constraints of the Straighten and Crop tools on your computer, you don’t really know how bad we are at judging fine angles and distances. Compounding this unfortunate human reality, the closer your camera stands to a square, flat object, the more pronounced seemingly minor miscalculations will appear in the resulting image.

Luckily, we have marvelous inventions like rulers, tape measures and T-squares to assist our lying eyes.

Setting the tripod height

We can find the vertical center of a typical cover by placing an album at the edge of our workspace, and measuring the distance from the floor to the top of the cover. Then, simply subtract half the cover height and you have the distance from the floor to the center of your lens. In the example above:

40 ⁵⁄₈” — 6 ¹⁄₈”  =  34 ½”

So, in this example, the height of my tripod—from floor to the midpoint of my camera lens—is measured out to be exactly 34 ½ inches.

Hey, wait a second…. Didn’t you earlier say that album covers are 12 ³⁄₈” square? How come you’re using 6 ¹⁄₈” , which would be half of 12 ¼ inches?

Well, yes, I did, that is the correct standard, but in practice you’ll find that most older covers seem to be 12 ¼” square. Perhaps they shrink… like grandparents. Besides, do you really want to deal with 16ths of an inch after halving the height?

Finding the horizontal center

Determining the horizontal center of the album is again very simple. The center will be half the width of the album, measured from the left edge. Again, assuming a width of 12 ¼ inches, the horizontal center will be  6 ¹⁄₈ inches from the left edge. So, with an album in place on the “stage,” measure 6 ¹⁄₈ inches from the left edge of the album, set a mark on the base mat, and align the tripod so that the camera lens is centered on this mark. Easier said than done, since we haven’t yet talked about the distance between the album cover and the tripod. For now, just note the center mark and place the tripod as close to the album cover as possible with the lens aligned with the center mark.

Note: If you’re using a camera that supports auto focusing points, you can get really fancy by placing rubber bands around a test album at the horizontal and vertical middles. Where the rubber bands cross is the absolute center of the album cover. Move the tripod horizontally from left to right while keeping the camera perpendicular to the album cover (do not swivel the tripod head, as this will alter left/right perspective), and use the center autofocus point as a guide for finding the point at which the rubber bands cross. When the autofocus point is dead center over the crossing point—bam!—you’ve found the horizontal center of the album cover.

Setting the distance from the camera to the cover

Remember, close is generally “not good.”

How can that be? Close is always good! Look at this fantastic photo I took of a bee pollenating this sexy flower!

Close may be good for the amorous ways of nature, but it introduces lots of problems when photographing square images. Imagine, for a second, that you have super wide angle lens and place your camera one inch away from the center of the record album.

Great! See? It’s just like bee porn!

Ah, you may be one inch from the center, but geometry tells us that you’re now also 6 inches from the edges, and 8 inches from the corners. Good luck with that. Next, think about all those street-level photos you see of buildings, where vertical walls seem to shoot off at diagonals towards the corners of the picture frame. Yet, buildings shot from the distance appear as they rectangularly should. From closeup, the angle between the camera and the building’s edges is very wide, approaching 90° as you’re about to press that expensive lens to the granite facade. As you pull the camera back, the angle becomes increasingly small, approaching zero as the building fades off into the horizon.

The same holds true for album covers. As you pull the camera back from the center point, the angle to the edges and corners becomes smaller and smaller, and the picture you take will become, well, more album-like, with straight edges and nice 90° corners.

The same effect is achieved by increasing the focal length. But don’t go too crazy; there’s no need to slap on your telephoto and shoot your album covers from half a block away. Depending on your camera and lens, a focal length of around 17 to 20mm should work great. On my Canon SD1000, I zoom to 3x, which is the optical limit for my camera before going into digital. This works out to a focal length of 17.4mm.

Note: You definitely don’t want to use digital zoom when photographing album covers, or pretty much anything else except for spy surveillance photos that are intentionally all pixelated and blurry to raise “reasonable doubt” when you present your “clandestine mob meeting” photos in court. Digital zoom is evil; it’s like taking an jpeg of an postage stamp and blowing it up to the size of a building.

Getting back to our example, turn on live display mode and zoom to a reasonable focal length (as above, the 3x level for my SD1000). Initially, the LCD display will be filled with a zoomed portion of the album’s center. Slowly pull the tripod back along the horizontal center line, being careful to keep the camera parallel to the plane of the album cover. If one side of the tripod scoots back a little more than the other, so too does that side of your lens, and you’ll be introducing left/right perspective skew. You can see this effect through the LCD display: the album may be horizontally centered in the frame, but the top and bottom edges on one side will appear slightly taller than the edges on the opposite side. Isn’t geometry fun? (Or, frustrating?)

Note: Feel free to use a T-square, a fancy laser level, equal lengths of string, or whatever other trick you may have up your sleeve to remain on the centerline. I use the seam between the boards of my hardwood floors, which are perpendicular to the bookshelf workspace.

Pull back far enough for the entire cover to be visible on the LCD display. Unless you have a very steady hand (and have made absolutely precise 16th of an inch measurements), you’ll invariably introduce a little bit of left/right skewing to the image in the LCD. No big deal. If the right edge looks a little taller than the left, then the right side of the lens is a little closer to the cover than the left.

You could correct this problem by nudging the right side of the tripod back just a hair, but once you start fiddling with the tripod you’ll soon find yourself in a frustrating battle of left/right overcorrection.

A better solution is to make these final fine adjustments to the album cover itself. It’s much easier to move the right side of the cover back a smidgen, than it is to move the tripod—especially if the album cover is being supported by a moveable object (like a bookend) as opposed to a wall or window.

Finally! Let’s take a picture!

This is the easy part. The camera is far enough away to reduce distortion, it’s at the right height, and the lens is pointing at the very center of the album cover. But before you shoot that vinyl envy photo, carefully check the LCD for any unwanted glare or reflections. Some of the very best album covers frequently sport high gloss covers that will produce glare or reflect light in unwanted ways. You could eliminate glare with a circular polarizing filter (and I will applaud your dedication), but remember—we’re leaving all the fancy equipment in the studio, and you’re unlikely to have a filter available for your point’n’shoot. I typically eliminate unwanted sources of light by shadowing glare spots with additional black mats or cardboard card. Or (since I use natural light), I just wait until a time when the sun is in a different spot in the sky.

My cover photos are all shot in Manual mode with the flash turned off, and I pretty much allow the camera to do everything else, though I sometimes increase the exposure time if the light is lower than desired. We’re shooting on a tripod so we have the luxury of longer exposures. Your particular lighting conditions will certainly dictate the camera settings. Just remember to turn off the built-in flash!

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