Joy of Love: Day 6

Today's assignment is to photograph the object of our loved one's affection. Although Willette Designs' assignment was titled "the ones they love," I decided to take this assignment in a little bit of a different direction. Instead of capturing a pic of my eldest son mauling the baby or of him napping with his "whii pooh" (okay, I tried this last one but the lighting was too low), I snapped a pic of my husband's guitar. It is revered like a family member, traveled with us hundreds of miles, suffered and lived through countless injuries. It has tales to tell and helps us to sing our stories.

When I first started dating my husband, he was the long-haired, flannel-wearing, lead guitar player in a band. Playing a scrappy hand-me-down Kramer from his brother, at some point during our first year together, he told me that he wished he had an acoustic guitar. Knowing less than nothing about guitars, I responded to a classified ad some guy put in the university paper to sell his barely used guitar, and for $90 bought my husband his first acoustic. The first Christmas present I ever gave him.

It's certainly not the greatest guitar. The action can be a bit buzzy and the paint is chipped, worn down in places on the neck from notes and chords played year after year. But it has entertained around many a campfires and accompanied many late night/early morning conversations with friends. It was this guitar that my husband used to write a song about his dad, about my eldest son, and that he picks up now to compose for our newest little addition. This is the guitar that my two year old begs Daddy to play so that he can dance and spin wildly around the living room. This is the guitar that he helps Daddy to play, strumming proudly with one of Daddy's picks held tightly in his small hand. This guitar is loved.

Although deciding on the subject of this photograph came easily, the photo itself did not. In fact, I believe I took somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 photos today in attempt to capture one clear, interesting snapshot of a guitar. In attempting to figure out metering and selective focus, both of which I really tried to play around with in these photographs, I also had to learn a bit about lighting and ISO. Turns out, cranking up the ISO leads to really horrible, grainy photos. Too low of an ISO is one big blurry mess. I'm still not sure what ISO is or how to use a high ISO effectively, but eventually I found a happy medium with my lighting and ISO. The pictures are not perfect, but then again, neither is the guitar. Either way, I love them.