The studio where I work has a big instrument backline that we have available to our recording customers at no extra cost. Which is especially cool as it enables young musicians and bands to play on top class gear which they often don’t have access to.

One of my jobs is to keep an eye out for good deals in the vintage instrument market and find the best way to get them in our collection. So I was a bit embarrassed when the 12 year old son of a producer who’s been working with us on a project rocks up with his iPad and shows me a drum kit for sale that we’d been looking for for years.
It’s a Ludwig Vistalite “Tequila Sunrise” model made with bands of colored plexiglass from 1973. They’re not all that rare, but to find one in mint condition at a price that fits our budget doesn’t come along very often.
So as the kid’s dad declined getting it for him for his birthday (I honestly felt sorry for him), I called the seller in the UK and we made the deal for the studio. I drove over with my wife on the Eurotunnel to fetch it and once I got it set up in our backline room at the studio (cymbals, hi hat and snare were added from our existing collection), I was blown away at just how pristine it was for a 42 year old kit… it looked barely used !

Another part of my job is to take pictures of the stuff we buy for our website and FB page. I use a pretty standard set up with 2 main flash units with 60 cm soft boxes left and right, slightly oblique, triggered from my 5D on a Uni-Loc (Benbo style) tripod. But in this case I needed to bring out the true dynamic of the colored plexi so it needed something more…

I used an additional two small flash guns from previous cameras, each with a hot shoe fitting light sensor that triggers when the main flashes fire. I placed one of these against the rear wall to light it and reflect light through the kit, the other on its back under the two floor toms to shoot upwards through the clear heads.
There were problems though. There was no way to avoid unwanted reflections, for example under the cymbals and on some of the chrome stands. So I shot both with and without the small flashes and merged the best of 4 individual shots to get the result posted here. The small remote flashes were obviously visible in the image so I cloned them out in Photoshop.

Canon EOS 5D MkIII + EF 24-105 L IS, Manual 1/125 sec, f 11, ISO 100.
Uni-Loc tripod with Novoflex ball head.
2 x Elinchrom 250 watt flash heads with portable 60 cm soft boxes sync’d to camera set at full power.
2 x remote Canon flash heads with light trigger hot shoe fittings.

Tequila Sunrise

We have an extensive drum collection at the recording studio where I work and we`re always on the lookout for unusual kits that our customers wouldn`t necessarily have access to on their planet.

This kit is made by a small company called EcHo Custom Drums in Manchester, UK. The owner, a gifted coppersmith of 20 years, has a son who`s a gifted drummer. Between the two of them they decided to try making drum kits out of metal and made their name making models from mainly aluminum, and brass. The copper model here is their latest endeavor. Called the Cuprano, it`s made of 1,2 mm thick copper. And though it`s metallic, it has the warmth of sound of a wood kit but with amazing definition and focus.
I won`t bore you with tech details… if you`re a drummer and wanna know more, you only gotta ask :-)

As is usually the case, I was elected to take its portrait for the studio FB page and website. This posed problems as not only was the copper polished and highly reflective, but the surfaces were curved. This meant that using my standard flash set up with two 250W heads with 60 cm soft boxes would give me the dynamic to bring out the stunning finish… but it would also produce burned out areas where the flash reflected straight back through the lens, and there would also be large areas of dark where the relative darkness of the room reflected in the areas curving away from the light source (does this make sense so far?) And to further complicate things, there was so much fine detail in the construction that needed to be faithfully reproduced: the laser lettering on the bass drum rim, the brass logo plates, the intricate chrome hardware and the surface work of the copper.

I solved all those issues by taking an additional shot exposed for the natural light in the room without flash. I then superimposed the lit shot over the non-lit shot in Photoshop and simply erased the parts of the lit shot that were problematic. I was left with a lovely range of copper tones from cool to warm, the dynamic range that makes the kit so visually stunning when you see it for real.
I also added two smaller flashes (each with hot shoe light sensor to trigger them when the main flashes fired) behind the bass drum directed up the rear wall to inject additional dynamic behind the kit and which also reflected a bit off the floor tiles.

Canon EOS 5D MkIII + EF 24-105 L IS, Manual 1/125 sec, f 13, ISO 400
Uni-Loc tripod with Novoflex ball head
2 x Elinchrom 250 watt flash heads with portable 60 cm soft boxes sync’d to camera set at full power
2 x remote Canon flash heads with light trigger hot shoe fittings.

The Fabulous Cuprano

At ICP Studios where I work as a maintenance technician, we`ve got about 60 electric guitars in our backline (in addition to about 20 basses and 40 acoustics), so we decided to line `em all up in studio D and make a pano shot for our website, much like a similar shot we did a while back for our amplifier collection. As with the amp pano, in order to keep the right perspective and detail I needed to take over 20 separate shots, moving down the line of guitars in the front row, then stitch them all together in Photoshop.

With the experience of the amp shot behind me, I thought this would be a piece of cake… but in the end it turned out to be a massive pain!

Even using a super hefty tripod and being careful to maintain the same distance and angle for each of the individual shots, nothing came out of the camera perfectly straight… and unlike the amp shot, all the flight cases needed to be perfectly straight along the top and at the exact same level to give it cred (these were actually the cases that the late John Entwistle, original Who bass player, kept his massive wall of speaker cabinets in), so each shot had to be stretched to order.

Another hassle was the reflections from my flash system. I used 2 Elinchrom heads with 60 cm softboxes… no matter how they were positioned, there was always at least ONE bad reflection on each guitar due to the irregular surfaces. All of which meant I needed to take two shots per segment and use the best parts of each. So in reality, there were about 40 individual shots to deal with.

But one thing we learned from taking the time to do these pano shots and get them right is that it`s all worth the effort. Being that it's made up of high resolution shots, when zoomed to 100% magnification you can see even the minutest detail on the guitars.

We can tell our potential recording customers about our amp and guitar collections till we`re blue in the face… but they don`t really understand till they see the picture.

All shots taken with EOS 5D MkI with EF 100 mm fixed focal. Lighting: two Elinchrom 250 W flash heads in 60 cm soft boxes.

Axes !!

My band did a demo recording a while back, and discussing the cover art for the project we decided we wanted something colorful and with a sense of movement and flow (ie groove) which we felt our music conveys.

So being nominated for the job, I dug out a photo I took many years back in a discoteque in the Algarve. I was on a balcony overlooking the dance floor, and as they switched on the strobe light I wondered what would happen if I left my shutter open (yes, I rarely went anywhere without my SLR in those days) and let the strobe do the flash work...

What resulted was an amazing blend of static and blur depending on who was in full flow and who was taking a nanosecond pause. I had the exposure on auto so the camera would decide itself when it had enough light for a balanced image. The original format was landscape 1:1,5 so I needed to crop to square format to fit a standard CD box cover. Not much post pro, I just enhanced overall saturation and tweaked color levels till I got something that looked appropriate.

I used a simple text font for the name of the band in the upper left, credits and titles were on the inside cover which was also based on this image.

Original image shot with a Canon EOS 100 + EF 28-80 USM on Fuji 100 ISO print film.

Surf On Baba

This is the rack that holds our snare drum collection at ICP Studios where I work as a backline tech. The image was done for our studio website.

The cool thing about snares is that although a drummer might go for a complete kit with a certain dominant sound or attitude, it’s the snare drum that has the most dynamic attack, and so changing this component can fine tune the attitude to fit a particular track. And since we’ve started seriously collecting them, it’s been amazing to discover how different sizes, materials, methods of construction, and types of finishings can completely alter the sound.

It wasn’t easy getting all the reflective surfaces under control, but I found that placing the 2 flash heads (with soft boxes) at the most oblique angle possible helped greatly. I took 4 bracketed exposures and took bits from the most underexposed of the 4 to replace areas of the main shot that were overexposed.

EOS 5D MkI, 16-35L at 35mm, f13 for the main shot, 2 x Elinchrom 250 W flash heads with soft box.

Sparkle & Smack

Inspired by those devices run by the electricity generated from vegetables… this pumpkin generated so much voltage that it burst the bulb!

I did this by shooting a pellet through the bulb, aimed at a copper foil switch opposite. When the pellet hit the switch, it triggered my flash and so the action of the glass popping was frozen. Electrodes and coiled wire are props, but the bulb was actually lit (wire hidden behind the pumpkin) and I set my exposure for the lit bulb. Nothing done with Photoshop here, just pure fun with film, flash and pellet gun!

Shot with Canon EOS 100 using Fuji Reala 100 ISO color print film. Lens EF 28-80 USM. Home made softbox with off-shoe Canon EZ430 flash.

Pumpkin Lamp

Munch felt the pain of the entire world and was inspired…

Nothing quite as painful for me... but inspired none the less.

Story is, I had nothing better to do one night, so I put my face down on my flatbed scanner and pushed the button. It took a couple of tries, but I found that if you move your head to maintain a uniform distance from the glass following the scanner light, you can get pretty good focusing and some cool effects, especially with the hair.

NOTE—keeping your eyes open during the scan will NOT make you impotent. It might even improve fertility!

Funch's The Scream

Before my time at ICP recording studios, I worked for the studio owner’s father who ran a machine factory in the space that was to become the studio complex. My job was in building packaging machinery, mainly for the record industry. I did the mechanical and electric design and drafting, managed the production, did the electric wiring myself and supervised installation and after sales support. It was very hard work and I had very little time for much else.

But I still was taking pictures in those days. And as our workshop was filled to the brim with a treasure chest of machine parts, tools and mechanical measuring instruments… it was these things which were constantly surrounding me that started to influence my creativity.
So one day I just sorted out a bunch of mechanical stuff and started arranging the parts on a plate of anti-slip aluminum. And when I was happy that I couldn’t get it looking any more insane, I glued the pieces onto the plate… and took a picture just in case something happened to it…

Which was ultimately a good idea cause I hung it onto daughter Melanie’s door just about the time her teenage hormones started to reach ignition point. The glue was pretty hard core stuff, but there’s no way it was gonna withstand the force at which she slammed her bedroom door repeatedly over a period of about a month. I did try re-glueing, but in the end it all just got to be too much trouble… and so I sadly picked up the pieces from the floor and put them back into the drawers where they lived (and were probably much happier) in the company workshop… and totally forgot about the picture.
Until now....

Canon EOS-100, Canon EF 100mm fixed focal, combined flash and incandescent lamp with blue gel. Probably shot on Fuji Reala 100 ISO color print film... too lazy to look for the neg to confirm :-)

Gear Head

When self timer counted down to zero, well, just a nano-tad before… I dropped the two tangerines into a water-filled aquarium with blue paper background. Flash triggered as timer ran out.

Shot with a Canon EOS 100 SLR + EF 28-80 USM on Fuji Reala 100 ISO color print film.

Tangerine Dream

, this is the glass before I blew it to smithereens!

Shot on Fuji Reala 100 ISO color print film, with Canon EOS 100 SLR and EF 100 mm macro lens

Before Midnight

Nothing better to do one rainy night… made up some batches of colored water and sprayed them onto the enamel top of our stove with a plant sprayer. I looked for an area where all the colors came together and shot with a remote flash and 100mm macro lens. People tell me I should get out more. I would if it didn’t rain all the time here…

Canon EOS-100 + EF 100 mm f2.8 macro lens. Shot on Fuji Reala 100 ISO print film.

What's On My Stove?

This is the breath-takingly awesome pipe organ that overwhelms the space behind the altar in the basilica of the monastery of Monte Cassino in southern Italy. This organ has over 5000 pipes (!) and is one of the most impressive worldwide of its kind.

Perched atop a 1,700 ft high section of the Appenines, the monastery itself has a history that totally blew me away… founded in the 6th century AD, it was destroyed several times through wars and earthquake, the most recent destruction being the bombing by the allies on February 15th, 1944 as it was thought to be a German stronghold. In reality it served as a shelter for civilians, hundreds of whom died in the intensive 3-hour bombardment.

Amazingly, the entire monastery and basilica were accurately reconstructed according to plans and pictures of the original architecture, financed entirely by the Italian government. It was reconsecrated by Pope Paul VI in 1964.

Shot handheld with EOS 5D and 16mm end of my EF 16-35. I used two takes of different exposures and created an HDR image in Photomatix. I avoided using maximum HDR effect, simply using the program to compensate for the extreme range of shadow and highlight as it takes the best exposed areas of each shot. Also did a bit of color correction and stretching to fine tune the symmetry.

Organic Passion

This is a project I did for my son in law’s brother who works for a Canadian mining company.

The idea was that coating with zinc prevents rust, and he wanted to bring in the Fleetwood Mac Lyric “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” changing it to “Don’t stop ZINCING”!

The rest he left up to me to do a logo for the campagne.

I bought a picture of the Tin Woodsman from 

 from an image bank and layer merged a photo of rusted metal on his left side. I did the lettering in Photoshop, as well as the brushed texture on the axe with the element specs for zinc.

Seems it was a big hit. But I neva got the T-shirt.

Don't Stop Zincing!

Back in the beginning of time, before Eurostar and Shuttle, we used to take the Townsend Thoresen ferry over to the UK to visit my wife’s family. It was also a time when I thought nothing of going out on deck in any kind of weather to get an interesting shot.

This just cropped up as I came across a couple gazing back at the port we were leaving, the bright lights illuminating the clouds made me think of a city on fire… the apocalypse we were collectively fleeing…

OK, in the sobering light of the developer’s counter it all seemed a bit less moody. But it still conveyed the same message so as a nod to our collective isolation efforts from Covid 19, I thought I’d include it here.

Canon EOS 100, EF 28-80 USM, shot on Ilford 400 ISO B/W print film

Scanned to digital on a Canon FS 2710 film scanner.

Leaving

I found this going through some pictures a took in the Algarve, southern Portugal a while back (on film of course!)… It’s in a small town called Lagoa, whos inhabitants are not necessarily poor, but just seriously frugal. It amazed me that they actually washed their plastic bags so they could be re-used, even though they got them for free at the supermarkets. Lessons to be learned!

Canon EOS 100 + EF 28-80 USM on Fuji Reala 100 ISO color print film.

Bagwash

Retouching old photos can be a challenge.

When it's just enhancing tones and contrast it's relatively uncomplicated.

It gets complicated when the original print is damaged by tearing and/or staining, as was the case with this old photo of the father of a friend.

It was easiest to make an oval frame that left a lot of the damage out of the finished picture, but there was still a lot of cloning work involved in removing the blemishes. There were areas where I needed to guess at content, and the background was done with a gradient fill having isolated the subject.

Tony's Dad

One of the things I do is restore old photographs.

This is a wedding portrait of my son-in-law's parents Vicky and Luigi Gallucci.

The original on the right was in good shape, so only the colors, tones and contrast needed to be edited, which I did in CS4.

Vicky & Luigi

At ICP Studios where I work, we're doing a book to mark our 40 years of existence. The bulk of the project is displaying the cover art of the 1500 or so records we've worked on over the years, each page having 9 pictures of 8 x 8 cm with artist and title below each entry.

It's been my job to find, format and optimize each of those pictures. Some I photographed from the actual LP and CD covers, some I've had to search out on the web on sites like Discogs. For the records made in later years, mainly since about 2000, the job's been relatively easy as the quality of the on-line material is usable for the most part. The problem with the earlier records is that back in the day there apparently wasn't much importance placed on documenting album art, especially for the less famous work. And naturally we wanted all the pictures in our book to be artistically top notch.

So I set to the task of optimizing poor quality images, not only from the on-line sources but also from photos of actual LP albums (from as far back as the early 80's) which hadn't been looked after well. I delved deep into the depths of Photoshop working on this project for over a year, mainly as regards getting low resolution images resized to print quality without distraction of noise, fuzziness and digital artifacts.

In this example, I found a picture of an album we did in the 90's which was on sale on eBay (left). It was the only picture I could find with the special edition cover showing the actual studio setting in the background. I started by using a perspective crop tool to bring the sides straight and create an 8 x 8cm x 300 dpi image. It wasn't too difficult getting the colors and contrast right, but the reflections of the plastic CD cover needed to be worked on manually to reconstruct the content underneath. The finished version is on the right.

A labor of love. But that's just the way we roll on my planet.

Cover Art

This is where it all happens. My Sanctuary.

It's a small room, so full of stuff I can barely get through the door. I could rabbit on for hours describing its contents, each and every object has a history and is an essential par of the puzzle that keeps my inspiration honed.

And as such, whereas the rest of our home tends to change very little over time, this room is dynamic and changes constantly depending on what stuff finds its way in... and decides to hang around.

But most important to note is the pictures on the walls. Actual framed photos, paintings and sketches... mostly my own work, several from other artists, several portraits done of me by acquaintances over the years... on line viewing is essential in this day and age, but that cannot take the place of being surrounded by the physical article. Especially having it all in one place at the same time and in 3 dimension.

As for the rest of the stuff, some have said they'd love to spend some time inside my mind. I just tell them they'd only end up with a severe hangover.

Sanctuary

LEFT:  Grandkids Lorenzo, Matteo and Romeo posed for a pro photographer (not me!) with their mom in their Manchester United shirts as a tribute to my wife... who is the world's most passionate Man United fan.
Only problem - grandson Luigi hadn't yet got his shirt yet so wasn't in the pic.  

RIGHT:  Luigi ultimately got his shirt.  So I asked his mom to take a couple of shots of him wearing it in a variety of poses and shoot them off to me... which she did, and there was one in which he had his arms crossed so they'd just rest on top of the chair.
It was fortunate that the portrait on the left was cropped from the original which had ample space to allow me to include more of the chair and center the final picture.  And as there was ample free background it was relatively easy to get Luigi inserted.  The rest was just about getting the shadowing and colors to match the original.  Piece of cake!

I had the final portrait framed and gave it to Bev for Christmas.  She loves it, the addition of Luigi made us all feel strangely complete... it hangs proudly on our bedroom wall.

Bill Funk

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