Black Piccolo

Back in the studio again now that the garden is tucked-up for the Winter.

A piccolo is a small flute in the woodwind section of an orchestra or military band and plays exactly one octave higher than a normal flute – being the highest pitched instrument in that section. When I was at school (many years ago!) I played the flute and piccolo (the one pictured here) in the school and county bands, although I haven’t played either since then.

Anyway, back to photography; I decided to take a close-up shot of the piccolo and, with the keys of the piccolo being very reflective, I thought that I would use a black background for contrast. The main preparation was to clean the piccolo first – following a lens-trial shot of one of my flutes a few months ago which showed it up as being rather dusty (see That didn’t take long) although there are still lots of fine scratches from its use years ago. I suspended the piccolo with a piece of sewing cotton (which I removed in post-processing) and chose to position it on a third rather than centrally in the frame.

I use a Benbo tripod in the studio because it is very solid (to make it easier to position I built a tripod dolly some time ago – the design of which is covered in my post Trolley Dolly) and I mounted my medium-format camera in portrait orientation on top. My geared tripod head (see All Geared Up) came in useful to align the frame of the shot with the piccolo – which didn’t hang exactly straight. The black roll background was suspended behind with a holder that I created myself and lighting was from two strobes, left & right, both fitted with a softbox.

The good thing about shooting digitally in a studio environment is that you don’t need to use a light meter to try and predict the exposure – you just take a shot, adjust the lighting, take a shot, adjust the lighting, and so-on. It is actually very interesting and informative to see the different effect that even a small change in lighting power or light position can make.

It didn’t actually take too much time to get the shot I’ve chosen above. There are some things I like about it and some that I don’t. I think that this may be a subject that I return to over the Winter months as I teach myself more about product shots and studio lighting.