Composition of Green Light, Red Music

Click image to view on Flickr.

Incidentally that’s my brother’s electric bass — and if you’re now looking around for a sparkly fish in the picture, then you have entirely the wrong idea.

I went for the “inverse traffic light” colour sequence; green at the top, yellow in the middle, and red at the bottom, because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

This shoot was done handheld with a Nikon D7000 DSLR and a fairly heavy 70-300mm zoom lens, optimistically and odds-defyingly balanced between clumsy fingers whilst reclining inelegantly in an un-ergonomically low chair, in dim lighting, high ISO, largest possible aperture and a looong shutter, basically the recipe for not taking great pictures, and even with proper optical image stabilisation it took an obscene number of snaps whilst no one was looking, and a generous bit of patient tweaking afterwards, to get a single shot this good. Oh well, Instagram is going to ruin the precious image quality anyway, so not to worry, you most likely won’t notice anyway. (The more perceptive among my readers may have noted that this in fact is not Instagram — I simply copy/pasted the entire text from my post there and forgot to remove that sentence.)

I may revisit this scene later, if my brother forgives me for posting his bass online — no euphemism intended — without his express prior approval, but I’ll make sure then to bring the tripod. Watch this space.

UPDATE: My brother informs me that the bass in question is a ’74 Epiphone EA-260, and I’m not dead yet, so I have that going for me, which is nice.

Also on Instagram, Facebook and Flickr.