Shooting The Wombats album cover for A Guide to Love, Loss & Desperation
Published on Tue Oct 10, 2023 by David J Colbran
In 2006 Liverpool based band, The Wombats released their debut single, the Japan-only issued "Girls, Boys and Marsupials." Soon after I was contacted by a design agency here on Merseyside to help them photograph their forthcoming debut album cover. Exciting times !
Rather than the usual people portraits of a band looking moody they had decided to represent their music using found items and various junk, built in to a small model. Each item related to a particular track on the release. The model itself was to be the album cover and the items within needed to be shot individually. These became stickers which were included inside early copies of the album and also distributed as a guerilla marketing campaign tool.
Arriving at the designers to collect the model, I had to photograph and take notes on the positions of the various items. Then it was a task of carefully packing everything away in bubble wrap and taking to my studio to get the job done. After some experimentation with a multi-light set up I had a good selection of images of the completed model and these were sent to the designers and the band for approval. Next up was the more straight forward product style shots of the items for the stickers. I also supplyed cut outs of the item images with a pure white background.
Several singles followed before the release of the band's 2007 debut album, A Guide to Love, Loss & Desperation. Back then it was heavily promoted around the UK with a major billboard campaign and various promo features in the music press - NME remember them? Also the album featured for a while in the Museum of Liverpool as a reference to new music and artists that the city was producing - it's not all about the Beatles lol. Below is a small selection from the archives from a really interesting commission back in the day soon after I moved to Liverpool.
Author: David J Colbran
- < Previous news post
- Photographer for Labour Party conference in Liverpool 2023 Next news post >
- Portrait featured in Australian newspaper
Personal project "Everyone is Moving - Your Journeys, Your Neighbourhoods"
A series of pictures in and around Wavertree Sports Park. A little personal project from earlier in the year.
Professional photographers Liverpool work update for September 2024
Hit the ground running in September with absolutely loads of Liverpool photography commissions and super busy with events related to the Labour Party Conference 2024
3 Reasons to Hire a Professional Conference Photographer Liverpool
In this post I outline 3 reasons why you should hire a professional conference photographer in Liverpool and why that should be me.
"Just wanted to drop you a line to say thank-you so much for the brilliant job you did for us in Bootle barracks the other week - we hit the Echo and also the Plymouth Daily (where we have an interest in veterans services) so we were dead chuffed. Excellent Public Relations / Press style photography."
