For decades I’ve adored 4AD album art from the 80s and 90s. The genius team behind the photography and design was Nigel Grierson and Vaughan Oliver, who operated under the name 23 Envelope. They were responsible for iconic album art of This Mortal Coil, Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, The Pixies, and many more. Over the years I’ve tried over and over again to mimic some of the effects that I saw used in their photography, but my experiments always came up short. Much to my delight, my latest photographic exploration is the closest to their aesthetic, by far.

Last month I began printing out some of my photographs in order to manipulate the prints before re-shooting them (related blog post). For this exploration I started off by selecting a few images that were shot on a black background, leaving just a sliver of the subject lit. I printed off a few 8x10” portraits on my inkjet printer and filled a plastic tray with water. I set up my camera on a tripod over the tray and attached a shutter release cable. I setup a hard light at a 45 degree angle to the water so that it’d catch the ripples of the water. Then I shook the tray to create ripples in the water as I snapped off shots. After shooting 20-30 frames I stopped to review what I had and swap out prints in the tray. Such a simple setup with such a striking result.

For one of the shots I added a star filter to my lens just for fun.