Guitar Pictures
Mamiya RZ in a makeshift studio
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I seem to always start with this, so why break with tradition?
The photographic madness continues. The story begins
with my very beautiful Hasselblad breaking down on me four times
in less than a year. It was small things. But I lost three
photo-shoots and I got a little upset. So I asked around about
the reliability of Mamiya RB and RZ equipment. Turns out, nearly
everyone said try it, you'll like it. So I did. And they
were right.
My father builds classical guitars from scratch. I visitied him
recently and liked what he had built. He used all sorts of interesting
looking wood and thought they might make fun images. I loaded up
the Mamiya RZ with Kodak 160VC C41 film, set the camera on a tripod,
and tryed to locate an area with decent light. His guitar room had
a large west facing window. Being that is was after noon, the light
coming from the window was soft skylight only. I seemed nearly
perfect for what I was attempting to accomplish.
I chose four guitars and set about resting resting them on
a large drop cloth. Some of them had heavy gauge guitar strings
which gave them a great look and sound. The exposures were around 1/4sec at f/16.
In various arrangements I found different lenses worked well.
For these I used the standard 110mm Z, a 65mm L-A floating element
lens, and a 180mm W-N. The images were scanned from negative
by the processor. I have performed no manipulation other than
resizing the images to 500 pixels on the long side.
If you are a classical guitarist who has somehow stumbled on
this page and have questions, please return to the index.html
and scroll to the bottom of the page. My email address can be found
there. I am happy to answer any questions that I can about these
guitars. To this un-trained ear, my fathers guitars sound at least
as good as a $2000 Esteve.
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