How the Abbey Road album cover was shot
A photograph taken by the late Iain Macmillan (below) from a stepladder in the middle of Abbey Road, London, on 8 August 1969 remains one of rock and roll’s most iconic images over half a century later. Using a Hasselblad 500C camera, with a Zeiss Distagon 50mm f/4 lens, Macmillan only took six shots of the Beatles as they walked across the crossing near EMI Studios, where the group usually recorded. The visual idea for the shoot came from Paul McCartney.In a 1989 interview with The Guardian newspaper, Macmillan recalled, ‘We hired a policeman to hold up traffic while I was up on the ladder. A few days before the shoot, he [Paul] drew a sketch of how he imagined the cover, which we executed almost exactly that day. ‘I took a couple of shots. We let some of the traffic go, then they walked across the road the other way, and I took a few more. The one chosen was number five of six. It was the only one that had their legs in a perfect ‘V’ formation.’
Source: amateurphotographer.co.uk
