For those who don’t know, I’ve played the guitar since I was nine years old.  Throughout my life I’ve had times when I’ve played and times when I haven’t.  Right now I’m in a “dry spell” probably because of my photography hobby.

However a couple of years ago I was all about the guitar, I even got hold of a 1952 telecaster (it’s an absolute beauty).  Anyway Lisa was walking through Target around Christmas and saw an electric guitar with a Union Jack body and she brought it for me.  I have a few guitars now (five in total) and hang them on the wall in my den and Lisa thought the flag guitar would look great in my collection.  And it does.

So for tonight’s picture I thought I’d photograph the guitar.

Now at first I placed the guitar on a table, got out some lights and started shooting.  The images were horrible.  Every one was either heavily over exposed or just looked plain bad!  I was getting really frustrated and got a whole new appreciation for photographers who take product shots.

Then I got an idea.  Light painting!

Light painting involves turning off all the lights in the house and setting a long exposure on the camera (something like 30 seconds).  Then you take a picture of a subject and make sure that the image is totally black.  Then you get a flashlight and take another shot, this time shining the flashlight on the subject.  You get to wave the light around for the 30 second exposure and light the subject however you like.

This definitely takes practice and you have to go through the process of shooting an image, looking at areas that are too dark or too light, and then trying again.  I had to shoot the image of the guitar several times and every time got a different image (each one slightly better).

In the end I got a shot I really liked.  So for the rest of this week I’m going to be taking light painting pictures.  Let’s see how things work out.

We are still in “Girl Scout cookie week” so it wasn’t a surprise to find Carter and Master Chief tonight playing Cookie Tic-Tac-Toe.