Photoshoot in Atlantic City

Nelson Pavlosky — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:48:10 +0000

A couple months ago we went to Atlantic City with the amazing Rob Scheuerman as our photographer to do a photoshoot for the upcoming “Stay Awake” album, hoping to get some cover art. I don’t think we were successful, unfortunately, but we did get a lot of pretty pictures.

This stupid sign vanished less than two weeks before we wanted to take a picture of it

We had a very specific vision for our cover art, involving a road sign on the Atlantic City Expressway. Along the sleep zone where drivers tend to drift off with fatal results, sometime in the late 80s highway officials placed a series of signs reading “Stay alert”, “stay awake”, “stay alive”. We wanted to take a picture under the “stay awake” sign and make that the title of our album. Now, keep in mind that the signs have been there for decades. Two weeks before the photoshoot, Brian drove by them to check that they were still there, and they were in fact still there. He programmed the location into his GPS to make sure that we couldn’t miss it, and we intended to return to that spot just as dawn was breaking so that we could get a sunrise. However, the day of the photoshoot when we arrived at the spot, the signs were gone, leaving only the posts that they had been standing on. It was pretty ironic, in the Alanis Morissette sense. Or perhaps just unfortunate, as Ed Byrne would call it.

Here we are looking rather annoyed, sitting on the guardrail near where the signs used to be

Since we couldn’t take the picture we wanted for the cover art, the secondary objective of just taking cool photos around Atlantic City for publicity purposes became the main point of the day. One goal was to take some pictures that vaguely corresponded to the various songs on the album, such as a picture of us playing poker for “The Grinder’s Tale”.

"Oh man, this is so bad-ass. We should be in Rounders or something there. It's like Nelson is making a very serious comment to me, and I'm studying someone for tells. Or something cool like that."

Check. Another important goal was to get a picture of us with a sunrise or sunset behind us. Since we spent sunrise in a futile search for the missing road signs, we had to make do with sunset. However, the sky was becoming overcast and we were concerned that we would not be able to see the sunset from where we were in Atlantic City. We checked the weather forecast for the area, and it appeared that there might be a break in the clouds over Philadelphia. So we drove hell for leather to the west to get to Philadelphia in time for sunset, in hopes that we would actually be able to see the sun. I think it paid off.

This isn't a sunrise, which is obvious if you know that we're taking this picture from Camden with Philadelphia behind us to the west. But maybe people won't notice.

If you want to see the rest of the photos, they’re up on Flickr, just click the picture below:

And here is a beautiful animated gif that is too large for the front page:

Wrong Side of Dawn » photoshoot

Photoshoot in Atlantic City