Thursday, August 5, 2010

Old Steel (185 of 365)

Old Steel (185 of 365)

If you follow my photostream, you have probably realized that I'm a sucker for these old National resonator guitars. These shiny National Style O's are a real pain to photograph because they're really shiny and there's a million different angles on them to shoot an unwanted reflection back at your lens.

This is lit with a single Nikon SB-600 (bare and zoomed out) from directly behind the guitar and pointed toward the camera. The lighting, however, is 100% indirect -- there are two reflectors, one on each side, reflecting the light back toward each side of the guitar. This creates sort of a clamshell lighting effect, which only uses one light source. It also gave me some fairly even lighting and the large, silver reflectors didn't cast and direct reflections to mess up the picture (actually, they both cast neutral reflections that were larger than the guitar, so you don't notice them When you have a source, like a shiny, nickel plated guitar, you're actually seeing mostly reflections.).

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