![]() ![]() (“When I first saw it, I said, ‘Oh my God,’” Powell would remember. Thanks to Crenel’s hand-tinting skills, the sky, rocks, and children on the resulting cover radiate a glow of orange, turquoise, and purple hues that inspire you to pause and explore the image like a museum painting. (“It took weeks to complete, but fortunately Led Zeppelin were very patient,” Powell remembered.) Then artist Philip Crennel hand-tinted the photo, applying water-soluble colored dyes applied in layers with a brush and airbrush to create the explosion of color that makes the album so striking today. After Powell created a black-and-white photo collage of the two children climbing the rocks of Giant’s Causeway, he re-photographed the image in a light sepia brown. A black-and-white image essentially created a palette on which the team could create its own colors with hand tinting. Simplifying the design by using children and photographing the scene in black and white was a crucial decision. I realised that we could collage the cover together, due to the octaganal shaped rocks, if I photographed the children separately yet carefully composed, and in black and white. So Powell improvised:Īfter five days I took a radical decision: it was not to be a family but children only. There would be no glorious sunrise or sunsets on this photo shoot. Hot coffee, brandy, Mandrex, freezing rain, turpentine, tepid baths, bad food, boredom, damp beds, and misery.” Powell realized the original vision for the album cover was going to fail. One of the adult models, Mark Sayer, would describe the shoot this way in 100 Best Album Covers: “A nightmare. The two children, Samantha and Stefan Gates, and their stalwart mother braved freezing conditions and extreme boredom and became thoroughly fed up. Then we ran out of make-up and had to resort to car spray paint. It was early November and rained every day. I had wanted a sunrise or sunset, but the weather was terrible. It proved to be an extremely difficult shoot. Instead, the bleary-eyed team encountered gloomy, foul weather. Little did anyone know how hard it would be to just do it.įor an entire week, the design team covered three adults and two children with silver and gold make-up and dutifully drove to Giant’s Causeway at 4:00 a.m. ![]() Led Zeppelin Manager Peter Grant replied, “Money? We don’t fucking care about money. As author Mick Wall relates in his book When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin, Hipgnosis gave Led Zeppelin one caveat: the shoot would be expensive. ![]()
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