Vintage Palm Trees - Day 10 of 365

This is a beautiful 1935 National Guitar (Style O). It was once owned by a country musician by the name of Smilin' Max Henderson, who is a member of the Michigan Music Hall of Fame. I've played several of these old 1930's Style O's and, while they aren't my favorite National to play -- they have brass bodies, I prefer steel or german silver -- they are really nice to look at with the palm tree scene in the chrome plating. You can see the brass starting to show through on the underside of the strings from it's 75 years of playing. I really love these old Nationals.

I've been trying to get a good picture of the guitar since I got access to it last week, but the chrome plated brass body has a mirror-like finish and it is nearly impossible to photograph well. I'm not entirely happy with this shot, but it is close to what I'm looking for. To get this, I put the guitar on a stand in a white room and shot my SB-600 flash at a wall in front of the guitar so the wall would act as one big light source (so you don't see the reflection of the light source in the guitar). I shot a second SB-600 at the wall behind the guitar to make the background appear white as well. The flashes were fired remotely with the Nikon D90's CLS system. Next time I try to do one of these, I'm going to hang it from the ceiling so I don't have the stand showing. With a mirror finish, you can't photoshop out the stand because you will still have it in the reflections on the body of the guitar.

An Old Friend – Day 4 of 365

Here is a picture of my 1937 National Duolian guitar. I was having trouble thinking of things to take a picture of today, so I decided that this guitar would be interesting. This is my personal National guitar and it is probably the only guitar that I have that I won’t ever sell. I recorded a couple of CD’s with this a few years back and published them on mp3.com, which was profitable when the internet was booming in the early 2000’s. When everything went bust, mp3.com stopped paying for page views and then, eventually, went out of business altogether. Oh well, it was fun for a while.

I took the picture with a single off-camera flash shooting at the side of the guitar. The white carpet under the guitar reflected a tiny bit of light on the front so you can barely see it.

Rhythm – Day 2 of 365

This is a picture of a Les Paul style guitar. I haven’t played electric guitar in a while, but I saw the guitar sitting around today and appreciated its lines, so I decided to take a picture of it. I used an off-camera flash (Nikon SB-600) to light the front of the guitar while I took the picture from the edge of it. My Nikon D90 camera has the ability to fire a flash wirelessly via an infrared signal. This comes in handy when I don’t want the flash to come from the direction of the camera. Using a fast shutter speed, I was able to capture just the light hitting the camera while not allowing enough time for the ambient room light to hit the camera’s sensor. This way, it looks like the guitar is “floating” in the dark.