1-28 Photographic Irony

Yesterday as you know, I was in the woodshop working on my guitar. The guitar you saw hanging in yesterday's photo belongs to the guy who is letting me use his shop (and equipment... and sometimes wood... yeah). It's really close to being finished, and while I was there, he showed me the custom machine heads he had made for it. They are absolutely gorgeous. Luckily, I had my camera with me.




click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/2.6
Shutter Speed: 1/40
ISO: 80
Gorilla Pod


These are 24k gold-plated nickel, with a 16:1 gear ratio (in case that means something to any of you out there who are guitar players), real abalone inserts, and tuning pegs coated in real mother-of-pearl, which has been dyed black. They ran my friend a hefty $350. To put that in perspective, I paid just over half that amount for all the materials used in my entire guitar.

When I got home and opened it in Photoshop, I played around with the saturation, and realized that it was one of the rare photos that would look good in black and white. The irony is that I took the photo in the first place to capture the beautiful colors of the machine heads. But I cannot resist the siren call of monochrome very well, so I went with my gut. I'm happy with how this turned out. But I was unhappy that I didn't have a photo showcasing the beautiful colors.

Except that I did. Luckily, I took a few different macros of the machine heads. Photographically, this picture isn't as good, but I wanted something to have colors in it, so I figured it was worth the few minutes I spent on it in post.




click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/2.6
Shutter Speed: 1/15
ISO: 80
Gorilla Pod


Notice the gorgeous abalone insert. Absolutely lovely. The mother-of-pearl pegs aren't portrayed very well here; they look more like chrome. But they have these nice, deep purple highlights coming off them in real life, and that holographic quality that makes them highly reflective and awesome. These heads weren't cheap, but if I ever build myself a luxury classical guitar for some reason, I'll definitely keep them in mind.