Younes Bounhar Photography

The Guitarist

Those who know me well also know that I really like photographing nature because it doesn’t move and doesn’t talk back. Yet, my photographic mojo is largely driven by the creative side of photography. In layman’s terms (what do you expect, I am a scientist, I always have to overcomplicate the simplest concepts…makes me sound smarter…I think…doesn’t it? ), I am always looking for new and different challenges.

So, recently, I bought Joe McNally’s Hot Shoe Diaries, a really terrific book if you want to learn a thing or two about ligthing ands speedlight. So here I am smack in my McNally phase, but have no models to work with. So while waiting for my dreams of grandeur to materialise, I head to the museum of civilisation to do what I know best: shoot architectural landscapes. As I am waiting for the sun to set, I notice this fellow sitting on a park bench and playing the guitar. Like every time I am in the situation, I make up these great plans for  a guitar photoshoot, but can’t really muster the courage to ask the guy to strike a pose or two for me. For some reason though, after long minutes of intense internal debate, I do the unthinkable and ask the guy if he wouldn’t mind…guess what…he couldn’t be happier to help…he probably regrets it now. The minute he said yes, what was just a camera became a huge camera with a telephoto, a lens, a gelled flash and a lanky crazy guy flailing around to make it all work together.

From a technical point of view, I wanted a closed up shot of the hand playing the guitar,  with  a short enough shutter speed to capture motion, yet be able to have a fairly sharp guitar. The ambient light was neither sufficient nor attractive, so in my best impersonation of the McNally dude, I decide to create my own. I placed a CTO gelled SB-800 camera left, set at 105mm as a remote. A few test shots showed that I needed a shutter speed at around 1-1.5s to capture enough motion, which meant I needed to set my ISO at 400 and f/5.6. The flash was set at  rear curtain sync to flash at the end of the exposure and “fix” the motion, to get a somewhat sharp background. The cto-gel ensured the light mimicked  the warm light of sunset.

As a final “artistic rendition”, I converted the whole thing to black and white using a red filter and added some noise for good measure.