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lastfuture â Smash Me
Published: 2004-02-12 22:04:17 +0000 UTC; Views: 201; Favourites: 1; Downloads: 79
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Description
My instrument - lit with a desk lamp and some aluminium foil
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Comments: 13
this is going to be a long one, because you've given me a lot to talk about.
first off, i love the subject. i've always loved that section of the violin (or viola?); its curve is so elegant and poignant. you've done a good job with the composition, too, by setting it off with an equal amount of white, and placing the instrument so (it seems) the neck is towards the bottom of the composition, rather than facing "up" as we'd normally expect it. this gives it a casual feeling, free and unbound. the divide is a little too even, though, i'm wishing for either less white space or more white space, not a line (albeit a sensual one) down the center. maybe if you tilted it, to let the contrast sweep across the page rather than down the center, it would work out nicer.
also, i'm especially intrigued by your use of lines. the border on the top and left seems almost like a casual mistake, but it works well to set off the bottomright edge which is filled by the violin. i love how the grain of the wood goes with the strings. i feel like you could have made the focus a little clearer, maybe changing the aperture or just focusing more on a central location; it seems to be on either the bottom part of the wood or the base of the strings. the shadow is nice, it gives it a sense of reality, like we're not in some surreal world of voluptuous trees with ropes hanging from them.
the best part, i find, though, comes from the strings themselves. they seem to be the most in focus, maybe because they're the thinnest elements, but also because they are the "highest," and thus closest to us. i absolutely love how the strings fade into white, and, by doing so, they recede into the background, causing the violin wood to pop out strangely. is this why you chose to not include the border on those sides? if so, bravo; if not, who cares?
you've done an excellent job with this. the only thing that strikes me as particularly unsettling is the title, which seems to clash against the gentle elegance of the photo. but, then again, maybe that's what you're going for. i like that uneasy feeling.
great work.
-sha.
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WOW ... I am flattered by the amount of time and effort you put into this review on this photo.
Yes, it's a Violin and the neck is downwards. I chose that position to break out of the norm, making the shot interesting to begin with. This was one of the first few hundred shots with my new camera, at that time I was still getting used to image composition and lighting. If I repeated that shot now I would probably have only a third whitespace, like you suggested. I have experimented with tilted shots but I couldn't use them for technical reasons which I will explain now.
Making the focus clear was by far the hardest part of this shot. To better understand it you should probably know what I used to pull this off. With this being my first studio photography experiment I had no equipment or experience whatsoever. The backdrop is a white sheet of cloth which I had to artificially whiten out later because of nasty folds and shadows. The light was one halogen lamp positioned on a chair sharply above the violin lying on the floor. I tried working with a reflector made of tin foil on cardboard, but nobody was there to hold it so I had to do my best to tape it somewhere where it would make the most sense. Looking back at my photo archive I see that I used a shutter time of 1 second with an ISO level of 100 and an aperture of 5.6 ...if I did that shot now, I would go for a narrow aperture with a long shutter. The working title for this was "f" as in f-hole, but since you see the wrong side of the violin and it's upside down as well, I didn't use the title. More about the title later. The focus actually IS on the top part of the wood as you can see on the edge of the f-hole and at the bottom of the wooden rail (is that the proper english word?). The grain of the wood was giving me headaches since it didn't turn out sharp at all. To this day I don't know the reason for the difference between photo and reality. One thing I'm glad about is that you like the shadow. When I was artificially whitening out the backdrop I was tempted to remove it ... but I couldn't remove the visible solid base of something so fragile without it seeming unstable or miraculously and unsettlingly floating mid-air.
The strings definitely are not in focus. They may seem that way but what you see are the A and E strings, which are the thinnest and highest of the violin, so the E string which is the outermost should actually be at most a third of what it looks like in the picture. That they fade into the white was unintentional. At that time I hadn't settled upon a bordering style yet, so it's actually a lucky mistake
Coming back to the name, I really haven't thought that much about it when I put it. As I said I discarded the original title "f" which would have been confusing for anybody who is not familiar with the kind of instrument. I generally choose either titles that contain a meaning connected to the deeper sense of the photograph or titles that draw attention to them. In that case I went for a provoking title, animating people to think, to dispute, to frown by putting it into a contrary mood of what the image suggests.
I thank you a lot for your review. It has put a smile upon my face and saved my day (as if there was anything to save)
-- Peter
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wow... what a great, clear shot... it soooo coooll... ah i just have to +fav it...awesome work...
ÂŽm
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wow. brilliant shot mate! you play the violin? cool! any irish folk out there?
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Heh unfortunately not. I started to play it when I was 6 but a couple of years ago I found no more time to do so... I have played some simple irish folk in an orchestra once, but that's a long time ago.
I really should pull it off the shelf every once in a while and play for fun.
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yep, you should! playing an acoustic instrument can be challenging, but loads of fun!
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nice, i like it. it's very clear and the small shadow on the white background is nice.
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Thanks. I tried to make the shadow as soft as possible with the limited tools I had available.
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