Vinyl sales globally have been on a steady rise for the last number of years, with more music enthusiasts opting into vinyl records. We tapped into this market of music lovers, who are discovering the joys of music experienced on the oldest format. There is a unique physicality to the vinyl format, and we wanted to capture this in our work.

If you look at the grooves of a vinyl record through a high magnification microscope you will see these valleys of sound, where the music is actually a physical landscape. Every song has a completely different valley, like a musical fingerprint. To bring to life our endline “DISCOVER THE WORLD OF VINYL”, we wanted to capture in camera the exact location of specific lyrics. Lyrics that happened to also be place names. We picked a number of classic songs, and set about capturing the geography of the world of vinyl.

Using a microscope lens on a digital camera, we set about capturing the precise location of a particular lyric on a vinyl LP record. We played the record and marked the position. Then to get the right angle due to the structure of the micoscopic lenses, we had to slice the record using a laser. We then took a series of 400 shots over a distance of 4mm of the specific place in the specific groove where a place name was sung, and then merged them in a focus stacking process to create the beautiful vinyl valley landscape that you see, onto which we put the Google place marker pin for the final advertisement. The best lighting angles had to be tested to enable us to pick out the details, which was painstaking when dealing with a subject thinner than a human hair.