Album artwork photoshoot
For our process of creating our album artwork, we were lucky enough to be allowed access to the school's photography studio after hours. We had contacted Laura Smith to do makeup for us, providing her with information on how we wanted the makeup for Nandi. She brought a huge variety of different options for us to choose. We decided that we would like a lot of gold eyeliner and dark lipstick to make her facial features pop in the photos. We also wanted to use contour to create shadows on her face and make it look slimmer. This contributes to the synthetic look of the artist.
As this process was unfolding, we didn't waste any time to test out different colour and lighting and what we will need for the shoot. We tried out yellow and white tones on the softbox, and decided to go forward with the white tone. We also considered using a white balance board to reflect extra light onto the subject.
We used a Canon 1100 DSLR camera to shoot, along with a digital wireless connector that attached the camera to the lighting softbox. This is so when we captured a picture, the softbox would flash simultaneously.
Despite this photoshoot is for her whole campaign (meaning she would have more than one track), we decided that she could have re-occuring costume elements throughout her entire campaign. For example, we shot Nandi in her white costume she wore in the music video. We asked Nandi to pose in different ways and guided through what we were looking for by asking her to 'put her chin slightly down' and so on. We showed her pictures of professional photoshoots such as Cara Delevingne as inspiration. We made sure that most importantly, we would get the poses we had visualised on our final album design drawing. For this, we specifically did mid shots of Nandi posed as she is on Amr's drawing. This supports the technical and symbolic conventions of R&B - as we noticed similar products such as Mary J Blige and Beyonce uses mid shots with sassy poses. In addition to this, we used a black fabric background. We intended on using a lighter colour, however this was the only material we could use. We thought perhaps the black background could represent mystery and confidence, contrasting against her bright white outfit. 
We produced a range of different shots, from long shots to birds eye view for our inside cover.
One issue we had was that some of the shots were coming out with a yellow spot. This we could not understand what was occurring.
I think overall this photoshoot was successful. We took the pictures we wanted to produce from our final design, and used different elements such as the fan to include the technical and symbolic conventions that we identified in similar products of R&B. We are happy that we chose to do a photoshoot, as it highlights Negus' theory of a synthetic act, and creates a star image of Nandi; it suggests that the campaign is more about her than the music itself.
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