Lighting and Flame Tops

[Duane_the_tub]

LED and flash certainly make flame pop, but in my experience there is still no substitute for natural light when photographing a Burst.

 

[guitardon]

I noticed something today that was interesting: LED lighting affects how one sees flame tops. Notice how subdued the top seems in one picture verses the other? I caught myself thinking "that top isn't as great as I thought it was when I got it." Then today I walked in the room with nothing but natural light coming in the window (I usually flick the light on by habit) and was like "Wow! There it is! Ohhh yeahhhh!!!"

Natural Lighting - > LED Overhead Lights
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I noticed something today that was interesting: LED lighting affects how one sees flame tops. Notice how subdued the top seems in one picture verses the other? I caught myself thinking "that top isn't as great as I thought it was when I got it." Then today I walked in the room with nothing but natural light coming in the window (I usually flick the light on by habit) and was like "Wow! There it is! Ohhh yeahhhh!!!"

Natural Lighting - > LED Overhead Lights

Looks great either way. I gave one that has powerful flame at every angle. But I get tired of it once in a while. A burst that moves at different angles is my preference these days.

 

[guitardon]

They both look great to me. My latest looks similar on the stand until light hits it but when I hold it in the playing position the flame pops big time.

 

[Pappy35]

Here's the guitar in natural lighting!

 

[guitardon]

All I can say is WOW

 

[integra evan]

Yummy

 

[jktxs]

Natural Lighting - > LED Overhead Lights
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Popping flame has less to do with the type of light as it does with the direction of the strongest light source, your guitar looks flamier when light shines on the top's right face. The angle of the room light barely touches the top's surface as it's shining from directly above a standing guitar; it's almost parallel with the top. The room light is also a competing light source against the natural lighting.

 

[guitardon]

Popping flame has less to do with the type of light as it does with the direction of the strongest light source, your guitar looks flamier when light shines on the top's right face. The angle of the room light barely touches the top's surface as it's shining from directly above a standing guitar; it's almost parallel with the top. The room light is also a competing light source against the natural lighting.

It looks great in the playing position both from my viewpoint and the audience viewpoint. I’m no expert in how flame works all I can say is no matter how you look at it the flame is strong, it just moves around, sometimes more visible with a slight move. My other two have stagnant flame with little movement, this one is more alive.

 

[jktxs]

no matter how you look at it the flame is strong, it just moves around, sometimes more visible with a slight move.

'Sometimes more visible' is proving my point though. All figured wood naturally has a best angle to accentuate the figure. I'm not saying there aren't tops which show strong flame from all angles, but the figure has be to sufficiently deep for them to look so, and even then certain angles of light will produce more pleasing results. There are also modern finishing techniques like multi step staining (a la PRS) to 'freeze' the figure so that although it exhibits less movement, will look good from all angles.

 

[Sct13]

I read books on Quantum Physics (the "for dummies" kind) for entertainment, In Search of Schrödinger's Cat was one favorite, so yes, please do.

I can't do the math but I do get most of it conceptually.

OK....so basically think of a digital imaging chip CCD, (Charged Couple Device) as a waffle like grid. each square is a pixel, only lots of them, lets start with something simple like 12x12......Think of each pixel as a light bucket.....it catches photons much like rain drops ....(photons are particles of light that behave like waves...)

when the pixel is full it transfers the pixel count to an A&D converter, (analog to digital) to do this it has to be able to count the photons. It reads row 0 converts to a digital format that the software can read and writes that down, then on to number 1 and so on.... That's strictly grey scale....It will make an image out of the mosaic that gets converted to a digital read out.

Inherent problems exist....one of them is heat and that causes noise, heat is caused by the power that makes the chip work.....the pixel gets filled with heat, and it will read as a photon....so now what? .....it needs to run cooler.....The devloped a TE cooler ....its a chip that cools the chip.

The other problem is quantum efficiency, this is getting the photon count correct, and throwing away errors (like heat = noise, blooming, frost from cooling and the addition of color filters to obtain a color image)

Blooming is when the bucket overfills, and spills into the next bucket and so on.....Point an older CCD at a bright light source and see the blooming.....Also, adding color in the form of filters a thin film over the chip in RGB adds focus problems ....because blue comes to focus after Red and Green.....

There are many other issues with CCD's

So they came up with CMOS, CMOS fixes lots of those issues, except the red sensitivity got worse ...on many digital cameras (earlier ones) they added a Green filter as a slip cover glass, its the exact opposite of red and cancels out the strong reds.

A few years ago they came up with a micro lensing....this is where each pixel has a separate RGB and a clear filter the size of a pixel.....so if you cut the single pixel in to four ...there would be a red corner a blue corner a green corner and a clear corner.....(pretty amazing) they use the software to correct for the blue wavelength problem....
ITs all combined in the software and produces great consumer grade photos

So all of this is used mostly in Astronomy, that kind of photography is low light or low signal to noise.....where noise becomes a huge issue.....and you need to take and then subtract noisy Dark Frames..... thats a picture of the noise itself...

The digital cameras for consumer use don't have this problems because the subject matter is usually high signal that over powers the noise....But ....

Low light cameras now do the dark frame and subtract automatically....and very quickly.....so if you wondered about your low light cameras (i Phone) work so well at night thats how its done .....Turn up the ISO and watch it get grainy....thats noise....

So thats it in a nut shell.....if you want to go deeper I'll take questions....and I'm slightly behind the tech .....I still have a Canon 80D

 

[Gitter]

LED and flash certainly make flame pop, but in my experience there is still no substitute for natural light when photographing a Burst.
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This guitar is insane! I keep revisiting this thread just to see it.

 

[Duane_the_tub]

This guitar is insane! I keep revisiting this thread just to see it.

Thanks! Here is a thread about it:

R9 Upgrade with Vintage Parts (pic heavy)

Some of you have heard the story of how I had a deal all lined up for a 50s Les Paul husk and started amassing parts to restore it, only to have it sold out from under me. Once it fell through I was left holding some really nice vintage and repro parts. Part of me wanted to sell them all and...

www.mylespaul.com

 

[rockstar232007]

Not a fan of LED as any sort of photo-light. I use mostly flourescent.

Given the right setup, you can get some pretty decent results.