2008 CD Photos

Over 2008 it was my privilege to capture images for two CDs produced by Javier Mendoza. The first was a live CD recorded in Union Missouri as the second in Javier's "It's Good To Be LIVE" series. The second was the debut CD for Javier's rock project called "SUNMOTEL". I have included some quick images of the front and back sides of both CDs along with a little background info on each shoot. I will be following this post up with a bit more detail and links to the original images. All the artwork and photo manipulation on both of these sleeves was done by Javier.
























As Javier says in the sleeve the recording took place in a back yard on the evening of May 23rd. As you might already know events like this can be challenging for many reasons, some of the ones we faced were: Not enough lighting, wind pounding the backdrop, large bugs crawling on and in EVERYTHING, audience close to the stage area and video cameras setup everywhere that must be avoided.... I did manage to get some acceptable images but nothing earth shattering. It was quite an experience!















































The photo shoot for SunMotel actually took place at a real motel called "The Pleasant View" located in Arnold Missouri. The hotel graciously provided a room to use as a prop for being mentioned on the sleeve credits and a couple of copies of the CD. If you don't already know, photography is not my day job. This made the fact that Javier called the day the shoot needed to be done just a bit stressful. To add even more stress I had just completed a 32 hour marathon session fixing a Microsoft Exchange Email server. The earliest we could get both myself and the band together at "The Pleasant View" was 9:00pm. I packed up all my gear in the van, chugged a couple of Mountian Dews and headed for Arnold. One of the reasons Javier picked "The Pleasant View" was because it was described by one of the other band members as "rustic"..... After getting the lights set up I would describe it as VERY RUSTIC. We wound up shooting some promos along with several potential sleeve shots. In total I shot about 400-500 images. We packed up and headed home about 11:30. Because Javier was going to need the images by the following evening, I spent about 4 hours tweaking and processing the RAWs and burning them to CD no more than I got home. Needless to say, I crashed for most of the next day before driving to St. Louis to do the delivery.......

This all sounds a lot worse than what it was. You have to remember that my adrenaline level was through the roof over actually getting the gig. Time FLEW by!!! It was a GREAT experience and I thank Javier for asking me to participate.