I am Building a Guitar

I have been working a lot on building an acoustic guitar. My inspiration is the guitar that James Taylor plays (made by luthier Jim Olson). It will have an Engleman Spruce top and an East Indian Rosewood back. For those up on acoustics, it will be shaped like a Martin OM, except curvier and deeper bodied. I have the braces on the back. Here are some pictures!

Luthier Notes: The back is assembled in a concave dish in order to put a dome in the back of the guitar (this I think aids in projection). The dish is essentially a section of the surface of a sphere that would have a radius of 15 feet. I profiled the braces in the dish (in their respective locations) and then glued them in place using hot hide glue (old school violin making stuff). Next, the braces are quickly clamped into the domed shape by using 24" long 3/16" fiberglass rods to exert pressure. The whole clamping structure is called a go-bar deck. The fun part is that I built all of it - it feels good to see parts of the guitar starting to come together.

Photo Notes: 20 mm lens. It distorts, which I think looked really cool here. Ansel Adams said to never apologize for your lenses. Interesting thought.

Advent Service

Our friends, Aaron and Kristina (see last post with their son, Oliver :) put together a sweet Advent service at our church last Friday night. There was inspired music and sweet instillation-style art up. Here are a few long-exposures I took:

Photo Notes: 8 Seconds or so for the exposures. 20mm lens (good for interiors). F/11 for depth of field. Tripod and cable release for 1 and 3. Second one was an accident - gathered light as I walked to take photo 3 (had accidently hit my trigger release). I find that my camera's long exposure noise reduction is often a good call - I used it here as well.

Oliver

Oliver . . . what a great name and what a great smile. Megs and I could not get enough of Oliver when we were photographing his family the other day. Here are a few of our favorites:

Photo Notes: Shot inside a beautiful home with two SB-80's. One had a 1/8 CTO gel. The other 1/4 CTO. All shot at 5000k for WB. 1/8 CTO was shot through a 24" Ezybox that was directed at the ceiling to bounce the whole room (1/2 power). The other was into a white shoot through that was directed at the ceiling as well. The shoot through was kept at eye level and relatively close to the subject. This allowed some light to fall sideways across the subject while the rest headed toward the ceiling to bring up ambient. It was a really fun lighting scheme to stumble on. It really worked great. Megan was the one who figured it out which was fun too.

Norris Woodworking Cutting Boards

My friend Jim Norris is a fine carpenter with a great ability for design. Recently we had the opportunity to photograph a few cutting boards that he had made. It was fun for me because I got to do some "food photography" which I had been learning about by skimming through Megan's Donna Hay magazines. Here are the photos:

Photo info: Shot with a 24" Lasolite softbox (Ezybox). Megan did the raspberry and green bean lay-out.

Cutting Board info: The first board (with the tomatoes) is rock maple and cherry. The second board is figured bird's eye maple. Jim is available to make more cutting boards and can do custom designs. Email me if you would like to talk with him for more info.