There are certcain subjects that are just very hard to take a bad photo of. That goes for people, musical instruments or any other innanimate objects. Take this violin, for example. I just opened its case and used the black lining inside the case for the background and laid the violin under a floor lamp. I put a book under the case so the violin would lie in a slant to give me the perspective I wanted. The floor lamp didn’t provide much light but that was ok. I wanted the dim and under exposed look anyway to bring out the rich color of the wood. The low lighting also helped to eliminate other distractions in the background. I set my aparture at f/4 and changed the shutter speed until the hightlight didn’t blow out too much. I took about 20 shots but to be frank, all of them came out pretty nice. Anything shiny with pretty colors look great on black background – with proper lighting that is.
In Hindsight…
I should have taken the instrument out of the case completely and placed the violin on a black bedsheet or someting. That would have eliminated the distracting highlights from the case rim. You can see the shiney metal rim towards the bottom left and top right of the photo. The violin would have looked lot prettier without the chin rest. Lastly, the entire photo was cropped too tightly. That’s partly because I wanted to exclude any distractions in the backgound. I’ve been noticing that lot of photos are cropped too tighly. In digital format, this doesn’t matter too much, it still looks ok. However, when I print and matt the photos, I keep forgetting that I lose about ¼ of an inch from all sides and sometimes that could mean the difference between a perfectly framed composition to a photo that looks too crowded. Something to keep in mind for the future.
I like violas better . . . but this picture should be on our music folders at school, Pops, I mean, Dad =)