Last time we looked at some of the challenges presented when photographing musical instruments outside a studio environment. This time, we are going to address the pitfalls of shooting high-gloss finished instruments with a flash.

Studio shots, of course, are much easier thanks to controlled conditions. But, shooting high-gloss instruments, especially those with solid white or solid black finishes, can be a royal pain in the rear end.

In this shot, I used a flash. To avoid heavy glare as much as possible, I took the shot from an angle. Then, I downsized the file for posting on the internet (in this article). I used a jpg format without compression (yes, some software supports this).

You may successfully avoid glare and wind up with jaggy guitar strings. I resized the image in two steps and did not compress it as small as I wanted to avoid jaggies.

You can see the resulting image is good enough for posting online and good enough for sharing on your phone, but, I would not bother printing it. I will take a studio shot for my musical instrument records when I have time. For now, this serves my purpose.

Fender Telecaster Player Plus…