I seem to have become Johnny’s ad hoc photographer. This is kind of funny because I worked for Adolph Studly, a New York City photographer of art and architecture, when I was in high school (see page I wrote about my experiences with Studly elsewhere in this blog).  I offered my services when I heard about Johnny’s latest project–turning a discarded guitar into a work of art!

I’ll try to fill in some backstory as best I can. Seems that  a person on a tour of the Martin Guitar factory noticed a pile of guitars that appeared to have been discarded or rejected. They were told that the pile would be put through a wood chipper to make sure they would never be sold since they didn’t meet the rigorous standards of excellence imposed by the manufacturer. Somehow this individual came up with the idea that they be distributed to various artists who would turn the guitar into a work of art to be displayed and later auctioned off with a portion of the proceeds going to charity. Martin liked the idea apparently and “green-lighted” the project. Johnny was one of the artists chosen to receive a guitar. I asked if he would call me the day he was going to ship it out and I took these photos. I’m not too happy with the quality of the photos… I needed an assistant with a reflector… and how about one of those huge scrims overhead? That would have helped.

Make sure to click on the photos for a larger view. There is a bit of  trompe l’oeil in use and some other funny touches and jokes thrown in. These guitars will be on display at the Martin factory later this year.

I wasn’t too happy with the result, but the artist seemed pleased since it was the best photo he had been able to get so far. The painting had to be taken down and shipped out that afternoon. I kept thinking that somehow I could have done better. I just kept thinking about it.

I remembered that back when I had a darkroom, I was able to tilt the enlarging easel a bit to correct for distortions. Some enlargers have lens swing capability which helps, but  distortion correction capability is still quite minor. If you went too far, you would exceed the depth of field capability of the enlarging lens resulting in a portion of the print being out of focus.

Then a lightbulb came on in my head. Photoshop had a distortion capability in the transform menu. If I could distort this image in the exact reverse that the painting was distorted, perhaps I could un-distort the painting.

Sure enough, it worked perfectly! The negative was high quality and my Nikon CoolScan V scanner set to highest resolution scan gave me a lot of extra pixels. There was a loss of data but it was within the range to permit me to obtain a high quality image in the end. The artist was very pleased at the final result. We both had a good laugh when we realized that the frame strut on the left could have been removed for the purpose of  making the photograph. Somehow it did not occur to either of us to do it. I show the un-cropped image at right to demonstrate the amount of distortion required to un-distort the actual painting. I then tightly cropped the painting to match the edge of the canvas.

By the way, this banner will be used in the upcoming film “Passion Play” starring Megan Fox, Mickey Rourke and Bill Murray.

Photoshop is really a giant leap forward from the days of enlarger, chemicals, trays and darkroom. I don’t think I could have ever obtained such an extreme perspective correction by simply tilting the enlarging easel.  I still like the “look” of film and I miss using Panatomic-X film. (See the page on my blog 6 wellesley west for more about Panatomic-X.)  Technology marches on and in time there may come a digital camera that can match or exceed film… even Panatomic-X.

Owning one of these drawings is a great way to collect this genre of art. Trying to find a full size banner (if you can find one that is authentic) can be very expensive (in the thousands of dollars).

 I created a slideshow so that people could see the drawings in low-resolution. You can see it here. You will find lots of interesting typography, figurative drawing and some humor. You will also find some interesting insights into the creative process.

If you would like more information on how to purchase one of these great drawings, contact Johnny for more information.