What are some good spots to photograph a chess set?

Hi, my name is WintermintP. I just started coming back to playing chess and grinding away on my studying of chess last July. I haven't really been active on Chess.com because I mostly play over the board. That said, I've been wanting to start a new experimental type of entity where we have both a competitive chess team *and* a metal band both under the one tent, kind of like how esports organisations field multiple rosters for different esports and also have another roster of content creators on the side, but amplified to a more drastic route. The entity is named "Remove the Defender". I've also gotten myself back into the whole media grind where I relentlessly work on not only graphic designing but also photography for not only my band's album covers but I also plan to upload some stock photos as a side hustle on top of that.

One of the problems I'm facing at this moment in time is that I have to do an entire photoshoot for a new album cover for the band portion of Remove the Defender and I've been unable to find a good spot to set up a chessboard and still make it look pretty cool. And it's not like I can just set up any kind of position on the board either, I have to set it up in a way that it nods to the title of the album. The title of the album is "Marshall Attack".

Just to give you an idea of the equipment and situation I have to work with, here are two variants of the album cover drafts that I just did for the album.

This one has the gradient colouring filter which represents the two colours of the overall band nicely, the pinkish red and the light blue. I find it very difficult to express these colours well without using colouring filters like this but I also feel like this had been done to death so I'm not quite sure if this is what I should be doing, but the effect does give the photo some vibrance and the red and blue contrast each other in a way that it works well with the juxtaposition, and it's not like it wasn't my goal to make it look quite uplifting and playful. It does the job, but something still feels amiss, and it does feel like it needs some more stuff to give it either more life or some depth.

And this is the best I could get it without the use of the blatant photo filters. I still had to adjust the image by quite the margin just to make it look desaturated and dark enough that the table doesn't look very cheap. It does have a dark, serious look, which, isn't exactly what we're after, but at the same time, there aren't any sockets where I could plug extra light fixtures to so that we can replace the warm whites with something far more neutral like something I have in my room. It was the best I could do to make the room and the furniture at least not look cheap.

So far I've been taking these photos in my home, which hasn't worked out so well, especially because the home is very small and crowded and we wound up forced to sell all of our expensive furniture to make ends meet. So it does look like I'll have to find some other place other than my home to set up this board and have this ready.

What other places could we try? Mayhaps we should aim for daylight?

EDIT: I started wondering what could happen if I mixed the adjustments/vignettes and the colouring filters together and the results came out pretty interesting so I thought I should share.

And if we back off on the filter as if we were to really let more of the dynamics through in the mix, it comes out looking like this.

And if we really *really* work the fine line to make it look more like as if it were a light effect, we get this.

The covers look good.

Have you ever actually bought an album?

I grew up in the era where people bought record albums. I probably bought at least 200 albums in total. Most of them were selected because I had heard the songs played on the radio or live in clubs and concerts.

However, I will grant that the cover art was very important. I bought at least a few because of the cover art.

These days, as I understand it , nobody buys albums any more. Musicians have to live off the money they earn from playing.

Therefore, any of your choices is fine because people won't be selecting your music because of your cover art. There is no reason to obsess about it. If you are hoping to sell albums, I doubt that many people will recognize the Marshall Attack.

What matters is how you get somebody to listen. I have to believe that is still achieved by musical technique and artistry achieved through practice and dedication.

That works for both music and chess.

Sorry it took so long to reply. I just got my butt beat by my own teammate today at the city championships! 🤣🤣🤣🤣

I actually happen to have bought some albums myself. I bought a Skrillex album, an Amon Amarth album, and even an Aretha Franklin album. :3 Digitally I bought two albums from "The Royal" as well. I get that albums aren't the route that most newer bands like to go, but due to the sheer number of songs we get done and how ideas-heavy we tend to be, it just made more sense to go the album route and bang away at the fast pace of releasing songs like we do now. We tend to release pretty much every single song from our albums as individual singles and then proceed to release some form of midpoint check EPs along the way to kind a let our fans know where we are with the songs and then we rework the mixes one final time to release the final albums. We tend to have a pretty transparent approach to things.

While I do understand that not many people will know the actual position itself, most of our fans also happen to be content creators and bands in their own rights so we do tend to feel the need to provide nods to their inputs because it doesn't make sense for any band to not fully cater to their actual fanbases. This is perhaps one of the reasons why for Remove the Defender's first album we kind of decided to return to our metalcore roots a little more to cater for the new goth/emo followers we wound up accumulating, and also dip our feet back to some anime-esque symphonic metal as we wound up accumulating more and more fans from those audiences. We used to hate being called anime, but there was an entire fanbase war story and we wound up declaring ourselves anime people out of protest. So it made more sense to still make sure that the reference game is on point mostly because most of our fans are going to be just as nitpicky as we are.

Obviously we aren't new to the whole music game. We were already establishing ourselves as "melodic technical death metal + metalcore" type of folks when we were already doing One Minute Winter but this new band Remove the Defender is, while we're still going to keep it melodic-techdeath we're going to kind of revive the 2000s era metalcore sound along with the techdeath sound we already developed. One Minute Winter is more so a central hub for all of the experimental things we do. Remove the Defender has a more focused theme.