PLEASE click here and use the magnifier to get even closer!!

… and here if you just wanna get yer mind blown at vol. 11…:-)

Still doing promotion shots for the studio… can actually think of worse ways to spend my time…
But this I think will prove to be the one that came closest to driving me nutz!

We`ve got about 60 electric guitars in our backline (in addition to about 20 basses and 40 acoustics), so we decided to line `em all up in studio D and make a pano shot for our website, much like the amp picture we did a while back. And as with the amp pano, in order to keep the right perspective and detail, I needed to make over 20 shots centered on each of the guitars in the front row, then stitch them all together in Photoshop.

With the experience of the amp shot behind me, I thought this would be a piece of cake… but in the end it turned out to be a massive pain in the butt!
Even using a super hefty tripod and being careful to maintain the same distance and angle for each of the individual shots, nothing came out of the camera perfectly straight… and unlike the amp shot, all the flight cases needed to be perfectly straight along the top and at the exact same level to give it cred (these were actually the cases that the late John Entwistle, original Who bass player, kept his massive wall of speaker cabinets in!), so each shot had to be stretched to order. Which was actually easier than lining up the fckin brickwork!!

Another hassle was the reflections from my flash system. I used 2 Elinchrom heads with 60 cm softboxes… no matter how they were positioned, there was always at least ONE bad reflection on each guitar due to the irregular surfaces. All of which meant I needed to take two shots per segment and use the best parts of each. So in reality, there were about 40 individual shots to deal with.
Whew!

But one thing we learned from taking the time to do these pano shots and get them right is that it`s all worth the effort. We can tell our potential recording customers about our amp and guitar collections till we`re blue in the face… but they don`t really understand till they see the picture.

Basses and acoustics to come…