I had never attempted to photograph a guitar as still life when I came up with the concept of Scale. The only aesthetic direction I had was a white background, shot from overhead. I deliberately didn’t look at any guitar imagery beforehand either because although I wanted it to be nicely lit, I didn’t want it to look like a product shot so in order to not be influenced I just started playing around to see what I would naturally come up with.
I only used two lights because I only had two lights, a pair of battery powered Profoto B1’s. I also knew my setup had to be simple and compact. Being able to shoot without having to rely on a power source would also prove to be an advantage.
You can see below the first initial setup. The guitar was placed on little pieces of polystyrene blocks. Firstly, because I needed something to place underneath the neck to hold it up and I also put a couple under the body so the guitar would never have to touch the ground. It wasn’t for aesthetic reasons, I just thought it would be better if I could say to the artist that the guitar wouldn’t be on the ground.
You can see that I hadn’t realised a shadow concept. The front image is a single frame. The back is two frames, one shot for the body and one for the neck, then assembled in post-production. I discovered that I couldn’t light the guitar how I wanted to without a highlight running down the next which I didn’t like. The solution was to move the key light and expose each frame for the part of the guitar I wanted.
After this first shoot, I was happy with the lighting, the soft boxes produced nice light that seemed to wrap around the guitar and wasn’t too harsh. Although they produced a bigger highlight, I liked the trade-off of the soft light distribution.
After living with the images for a couple of weeks I knew I had to do something with the shadows. They needed to be more uniform for each shot. By the time I came to shooting the very first guitar of the series, Ross Knight from the Cosmic Psychos, I knew I had to take how the shadow was falling into consideration. This meant lightning from a consistent angle and also thinking about how high the guitar sat off the paper on the foam blocks.
When I’m shooting the front, the blocks sit on their short side. When I’m shooting the back, the blocks sit on their long side. This gives me the shadow length I need.
You can see the setup is similar to the initial test shoot but has been refined. This is pretty much how I went on to shoot everything in Scale.
KH