Photographer Iain Macmillan took the iconic image that adorned their last-recorded album, Abbey Road.
Iain Macmillan was a freelance photographer and a friend to John Lennon and Yoko Ono. He used a Hasselblad camera with a 50mm wide-angle lens, aperture f22, at 1/500 seconds.
Prior to the shoot, Paul McCartney had sketched his ideas for the cover, to which Macmillan added a more detailed illustration.
As the group waited outside the studio for the shoot to begin, Linda McCartney took a number of extra photographs.
A policeman held up the traffic as Macmillan, from a stepladder positioned in the middle of the road, took six shots as the group walked across the zebra crossing just outside the studio.
The Beatles crossed the road a number of times while Macmillan photographed them. 8 August was a hot day in north London, and for four of the six photographs McCartney walked barefoot; for the other two he wore sandals.
Not that the decision seemed so simple to EMI chairman Sir Joseph Lockwood, whose demeanor reflected his stuffy title. John Kosh recalled receiving an irate call from Lockwood in the middle of the night. "I get a phone call at 3 in the morning saying, 'You’ve f---ed this up. We’re never going to sell an album.
You’re a prick.' With a terribly, terribly good English accent – because he’s a blue blood, and I’m not," Kosh continued. "I’m like really scared; I’m about 23 years old. So, I go into Apple the next morning and George is there, and he said, 'Hey man, we’re the Beatles. Don’t worry about it.'"
Following the turbulent sessions for ‘The Beatles‘ and ‘Let It Be,’ longtime producer George Martin was through with the Beatles.
He eventually agreed to work with them again after Paul McCartney pleaded with him, but only on the condition that Martin would be in complete control in the studio, just like in the old days. Martin would later describe ‘Abbey Road’ as a “happy record … because everybody thought it was going to be the last.”
