Bass Guitar

Bass Guitar

We’re celebrating in our household; the kids have just finished a particularly arduous end to the semester. So arduous that guitar time was restricted to prevent diversion from the tasks assigned, if you know what I’m saying. That behind us, it was time to pick up the music once again. Here my son demonstrates some fingerwork on bass guitar. I slowed the shutter speed down in order to get some movement blur. I went black and white because the basement light was pretty flat, the room was other wise unremarkable in color. Plus, guitar is black and white anyway. The black and white emphasizes the shapes of the guitar and the hands. We also were shooting from the maximum wide angle of 18mm on our best cheap wide angle, the Nikon 18-55mm AF-S DX VR that we have been getting so much use from lately. In Aperture, I’ve been using the method I picked up a blog to convert to black and white. I start with RAW in color on the camera, desaturate, use the curves tool to pull red “northwest” and blue “southeast,” then desaturate a second time with the saturation brush applied to the whole image. It does a nice job with preserving subtle gray than the black and white brick.