Custom guitars are difficult objects to shoot. They are highly reflective and often have numerous curves and contours. Combine that with vastly different color tones of exotic hardwoods and suddenly you’re pulling out more lights and modifiers to get the shot just right.

I haven’t had time to pick up my Les Paul guitar in a long time. Probably my fingers wouldn’t really be able to move anymore, but seeing these amazing guitars from Matsuda Guitars really made me want to hold one and pick a few notes and strum a chord or two.

For this shoot I pulled out a 22″ gridded beauty dish for the main, a gridded medium softbox for kicker or fill if needed and a 7″ grid spot to light the instrument. Grids, have I ever mentioned that I love grids?!

More pics from the previous shoot. All of these shots used approximately the same lighting, two Dynalite 4040′s, one on the right rear through a Chimera XS softbox with grid and one on the side left through a Chimera S softbox with grid. The only thing I would change was the power of the pack and my aperture depending on what look I wanted. The black and white photos were processed with Silver Efex Pro and the color photos were processed with Capture NX2.

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I’ve had a couple things brewing in my head for a while now and I finally got around to it. Took a small plant stalk and shot it on a black seamless. I originally ended up with this:

In black and white it reminds me of prints made from placing the actual material on photo sensitive paper and exposing it to light. This was processed with Nik’s Silver Efex Pro, which has become my go to method of black and white conversion. After this series I started to experiment with different colors in the background. For the first shot, the three color patches are a magenta candle holder, a red plastic flashlight and a Japanese rice cracker. Yeah, that trips me out too. I threw that one in for fun and ended up liking the yellow orange tone it gave me. It turned out that the color was more saturated when left in the clear cellophane wrapper. When shooting macro, anything will become a pleasant blur when placed in the background. I’ve got more ideas swirling around in my head and some other photos from this shoot that I will be posting soon.

The weather has been pretty crazy. One day it’s sunny then the next, pouring rain and violent wind. Even during the course of the day the weather has been varying wildly. So what do you do when you have to shoot a scene that calls for tourists outside on a sunny day?

This shot needed a quick turn around and waiting for a sunny day was not a possibility. We decided to shoot it inside with the background to be added later in post. Above is an in-between state of the studio shot with the background added in. Much of the photo would be masked out to make room for type so it didn’t need to be a “perfect” post job. The key to this shot was to create believable lighting. More on that after the jump.

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Here is the shot with the background dropped out. I went with a typical outdoor lighting scheme, strong backlight (which would ordinarily be the sun) with a front fill. I set up a Lastolite Skylite panel above and behind the models. I bounced a 500 watt Dynalite head into it. On the right of it and slightly lower I had a 125 watt Dynalite head with a 5′ Octobox. There was also another 125 watt head going through a white shoot through umbrella behind and to the left. The fill was a large sheet of white foam core and a 62 watt Dynalite head through another shoot though umbrella above and to the left of the models.

I think it’s fairly convincing, especially once the copy and other cover elements are added. Below is a comp of the cover. I’m not sure how much this will change before it goes to print but I think it’s fairly close to the final product. Yeah I know, not very sexy subject matter…

Whenever I look at this photo it kind of trips me out. It looks like a composite but it was shot in a single frame. I guess it’s all the black and side lighting. There were two lights used. One on the right side with an octobox and grid and one on the left with a medium strip and grid. Did I ever mention that I love grids? I’ll grid anything. Anyway, getting back to the pic. If I were to do this again, I think I might go with the composite method instead. Much easier to fine tune the lighting and would not take very long to assemble.

This one was all hot lights. On the left was a 250 watt Mole fresnel with a sheet of diffusion and on the right I used the modeling light from a gridded Dynalite head.