Axes !!

At ICP Studios where I work as a maintenance technician, 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 a similar shot we did a while back for our amplifier collection. As with the amp pano, in order to keep the right perspective and detail I needed to take over 20 separate shots, moving down the line of 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!

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.

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. Being that it's made up of high resolution shots, when zoomed to 100% magnification you can see even the minutest detail on the guitars.

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.

All shots taken with EOS 5D MkI with EF 100 mm fixed focal. Lighting: two Elinchrom 250 W flash heads in 60 cm soft boxes.