Is there a trick for taking such nice photos? How do you make the background disappear like that?
Years of experience.
I do have a very nice camera and lens (Canon 1DsM2 w/24-70 f/2.8L), but it has very little to do with this. The biggest factor here is the setup. I use a single flash (Canon 550EX) on the camera set to 45-degree bounce. Make sure that there are no specular highlights on the guitar, and no reflections on the shiny bits. Also try to clean off all fingerprints. Dog hair is a problem in my house, even though the dogs aren't allowed in my home office, so I'm constantly battling that.
The next big thing after setup is knowing how to use raw tools (I use Capture One Pro) and Photoshop.
Here's what I do:
Get some white foam board from Staples. It's really just white foam board.
Put guitar on one or more foam boards. Pic usually looks like this:
I shoot raw, which is why the pic looks so flat. Next, I edit the levels to make the colors pop and over-saturate the white. This can be very difficult if the guitar is white, and then it's all about selecting out the guitar which is a huge PITA, so I'll sometimes use a different background. Once I adjust the levels, I get something like this. I try to make the guitar's top pop with one like this, but there's a fine line where if you go to far it doesn't look real, and that's down to experience.
Some guitars are just really hard to photograph, so that's another experience thing. Sometimes the easiest thing to do is to bring them outside and let the sun make the magic.
I then do a combination of cropping out anything that's distracting, and since I don't have a real studio, I sometimes have to use Photoshop to get rid of the gap between the boards. The end result is this:
I like the look, but sometimes it takes me a long time to make it work. Sometimes it's TOO artificial since I lose the nice subtle reflections, but it's become sort of my standard look for guitar shots so I've got it down to a science.
It's even more work on a full guitar shot. Here, the pickup covers are blown out (no detail) because they're off-white and got pulled into my attempts to wash out the background. You can also see the corners aren't quite right. This was when I was just getting the technique down and didn't have it quite right yet.
HTH!
