This tutorial will ensure that you can put a picture on gumtree that will show your guitar at its best. Best of all, you don't need a R40,000 camera to do it.
There are guitars that can mesmerise me. But often on gumtree I can hardly be bothered to click through to take a closer look. Because the seller has photographed the sublime instrument in such a way as to conceal its beauty in every way.
This is unnecessary. Showing your guitar to its best advantage will maximise the number of people who want to see it. More buyers mean you won't have to sell at a scandalously low price.
"To hell with you," you say. "I'm a guitar player, not a photographer." A fair point. And I'm not going to bother you a moment with f-stops and ISOs, shutter-speeds or strobes. But you don't need to know anything technical to make your guitar look great. Because even the very simplest cameras today will do all that for you. You just need to remember a couple of simple things.
1. Lose The Flash
When you take your picture in your living room at night, you can see plenty. Your camera, however, can't see squat. So it spits ugly light out in front of it so you that Auntie Ethel is at least visible in the picture. Now there's a fair chance that you don't much care what Auntie Ethel looks like at the end of the day. But you want your guitar to look as beautiful as the day you took it home. Here's what happens when you use the flash:
Ugly guitar, right? Or is it just an ugly picture? The flash has made ghastly highlights on the tuners, cast revolting shadows everywhere. Everything has a sickly shine to it. The body of the guitar looks like Rooikrans. I ain't buying this.
2. Rotate The Image
Noticed anything else about the picture? Yup. It's defying gravity. It just looks weird to my eyes. Your camera, or your phone, will probably have an option somewhere designed to allow Isaac Newton to rest easier in his grave.
3. Lose The Clutter
Ok. I can't emphasise this enough. Take your guitar somewhere where there's no crap in the background. Nothing. No shoes. No guitar pedals. No pot-plants. Even windows, burglar bars, chests-of-drawers will kill your buyer's ardour.
We see in 3-D, and our brains are able to focus our attention on the important stuff. Photographs are 2-D. Once you lose dimension number 3 (the beauty dimension), all bets are off. Everything competes for attention. If it's not part of the guitar, lose it. I don't think I need to point out the clutter in the above pic.
4. Avoid Funny Angles
Guitars are pretty much designed for viewing from the front. Show them from above or below and they often start to look like your-guitar-on-drugs. It's not attractive.Note once again, the ugly shadows, the nasty highlights and the mountains of rubbish in the background.
In particular, you want to avoid white objects in the frame - which is also a good reason to avoid windows and doors opening onto the outside world, or patches of sunlight - which will be white in comparison to shadier bits. For some curious reason, the eye is drawn to light coloured objects in a photograph. Don't ask me. It just is.
5. Lose The Fuzz
Guitarists know that fuzz can increase your awesomeness quotient appreciably. In the hands of a master, it can do the same in photography. If you're not a master, lose it. What am I on about? I'm talking about those blurry close-ups that make it look like the seller has something to hide, rather than show.
Here's the thing: cellphones and compact cameras especially have a hard time focusing this close. Even if you select the "tulip" mode (the little flower representing close-up mode) they often struggle to do what you want. The best thing you can do for yourself is back on up a bit.Get into the Goldilocks zone. Not so far that you can't see the details, but not so close that your camera won't focus.
Of course, the other cause of the big fuzz-out is losing the flash, but shooting in your gloomy living room at midnight lit by romantic candlelight. From the camera's perspective, there's so little light it has to take ages to form a bright image. Unless you make a living pretending to be a statue, it's going to come out blurred. Take the guitar somewhere bright.
"Ok wise-ass." you say. "You've sneered at what we shouldn't do. But how does that help me? I don't have a photography studio handy, and I left my Canon 800mm f5.6 Telephoto lens in my other pants. How can I improve on this with the camera I've got?"
Two magic words for you: open... shade.
6. Open Shade
You find a place where it's bright. Outdoors will usually do it. You then look for an uncluttered space that's in shadow. No. Not in the cellar. It's "open" shade, remember? The shadow cast by a wall is perfect. The wall can also provide that uncluttered background we spoke about (remember to avoid little patches of sunlight in the pic).
The great thing about being in shadow is that you don't really get shadows in shadow. You get what photographers call "soft" light - which looks good and makes the details clear. By the way, this will make your Auntie Ethel, or your delay pedal look good too. Also bear in mind that, on a bright, overcast day, everything is in open shade.
"Yeah. But I still have my crappy camera. You gonna buy me a better one?"
7. The Best Camera is the One You Have With You
Photographers know that the whole camera thing is nonsense. You think Jimi Hendrix would sound worse than you if he's playing a Hondo II and you're playing a '59 sunburst Les Paul? The picture is the thing. The camera's just for a little polish.
So I decided to use the worst camera I own, the inglorious, and omnipresent, cell-phone cam. Between you and me, all cell cameras are rubbish - irrespective of the number of megapixels. That's all hype. Grandad's Pentax Spotmatic will leave the world's best cellphone cam in its dust. And mine's not a camera optimised phone but a bog standard Nokia, homeless-people-will-have-them-in-two-months phone. So here goes:
Now the buyer's got something to work with. No clutter. Just guitar. No ugly shadows, just the guitar as it looks in real life. No weird distorted shapes. This is what the guys at Yamaha wanted this thing to look like. No ghastly blur. You can see that it doesn't have a twelve inch gash across the body. No shadows.This is starting, just starting, to look like a guitar I might covet, and that's ok. I might begin to think, "Hmm, I wonder how she plays..."
Ok. You want a bit more? This is just how my useless cell-phone cam wanted this to be. But here's a weird thing. It doesn't look like it to us, but shadows are blue. Like, really, really blue. That's why this girl looks a little sad.
8. White-Balance (Optional)
Now my cell-phone wouldn't let me do this, but your camera or cell phone might. You go to the options for your cell. There'll be an option that says, "White-Balance." Select it, and you'll see a bunch of items. What you're looking for is "shade," "cloudy," or a little picture of a cloud. Select it before you shoot, and it'll take your blues away.
9. Brightness/Contrast (optional)
More? Ok. Your camera, phone, or computer image software will give you an option called "Brightness/Contrast." Give it a little of this to add some pep to your image - get the blacks blacker and the whites whiter. It's a bit like the contrast knob on your ancient Telefunken TV. Be careful not to go too far though. You don't want glaring white highlights and impenetrable shadows. You still want people to be able to see the details.
Then you start to get this:
Finally. This looks like something I might start to really get a jones for.This isn't your little cousin Jimmy's Pacifica. This is a whole other kind of hand-made-in-Japan by Zen monks kind of Yamaha.
By being out in the bright open shade, I avoided the dreaded fuzz I would have got in the dim light of the living room. To photograph the back of the headstock, I didn't get so close that the phone was way out of focus. This may not make it into a Yamaha catalog anytime soon, but it's a big improvement from what we started with.
Remember, all you need is a camera of any description, and a bit of open shade free of clutter. Oh, and if you're feeling too creaky to get down low enough to avoid the distorted guitar-on-drugs thing, put it up on something or ask little Jimmy to put down his Hondo II and do it for you.
10. Size matters
Finally. Make sure that the image you post in your ad has at least 600 pixels (and no bigger than 1200 - let's not get carried away) on its longest side. Its not uncommon to see tiny images blown up large on gumtree. This will ruin all your hard work. The image will become a mass of blobby, detail-less blocks. Not a pretty sight.
I hope to return soon with part II: How to Make Your Guitar Look Like A Million Bucks
