A Lesson in Lighting!
Hi All,
Apologies for being absent lately, I just haven’t been doing anything particularly noteworthy over the last month. However, just recently I had the pleasure of spending some time with a Fender steel guitar and some handmade timber guitar stands which are made by a friend of mine.
These items are both works of art but photographing them was an exercise in controlling & shaping light to show them both at their best!
I had the guitar for a couple of days before the stands arrived so I had a little play with a couple of speedlites, coloured gels and a white wall to see what I could come up with.
This was one of the early images I got before I decided to get a little more adventurous with a red gelled speedlight bounced off a wall.
I quickly learnt that polished steel will show up any imperfections pretty quickly so I spent a lot of time wiping off fingerprints! The other thing I learnt was that even though you need a broad area of light (ie bounced flash) it was sometimes the smallest angle change that made all the difference to the reflection on the guitar.
When the stands arrived I had an idea that a spotlight type of lighting similar to a stage might work ok so a snooted Speedlite held above the stand gave me the light to show the stand to advantage without light going all over the place!
The guitar need another speedlite fired through a diffusion panel on the floor to camera right. Both flashes were were in manual mode & fired by wireless triggers.
Once again it was a game of small adjustments and the best way to attack this is to adjust one flash at a time and build it up from there. The end result was what I was aiming for and my friend was more than happy!
The Mantis Guitar Stands are more a piece of furniture than something you would use at a gig. Each one is hand-crafted from re-cycled boatbuilding timbers such as Huon Pine, Mackay Cedar,Teak & Beech to name a few. Steam bent and laminated with epoxy glues, each stand is an individual. 
They really are a beautiful piece of work and I hope the images do them justice! If anybody would like some more info, send an email to wokkasmith @bigpond.com
I’m off to Tasmania for a couple of weeks, see you when I get back!
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