Pixel Darkroom Photography

I’m working on a generic image for a music website in Germany and here is part of the design I’m working on. Brownie points for those who know what piece of music this is. Dinu and Dandu & Co. please do not post the answer, I will remove it mercilessly. Maybe there are other pianists visiting my blog that can throw in their answers. I’ve been working on this piece lately and hope that pretty soon I can enjoy playing it in its entirety. It’s a master piece of the Romantic piano literature.

I wanted to get the texture of the paper so I had to get in very closely to the score and then cropped some more to get the image even tighter. Shot with a harsh light from the left to reveal the minuscule crevasses of the paper.

Nine more days.

Lighting info: 580 EX II CL via Pocket Wizards. Shot very close at 1/128th power zoomed to 105mm at f14 using +7 diopter filters.

This is Piano Time Before Bedtime. It doesn’t happen very often although it should. One of my fondest memories of my childhood was when my Dad would play piano for us. We played so much one time, that he forgot entirely that he put water on the stove to boil and make tee. He put the leaves in the boiling water and left them there until we realized later that we had completely forgot about his tee. Once the funny smell came from the kitchen, from his tee, we all ran into the kitchen to find the kettle all dried up with flickering ashes inside. We remember to this day that Dad made “tee with sparks”.

When he played piano for us he would improvise most of the time, and I could not understand for the life of me how he did it. He would just say, “just put your hand on the piano and let it walk, then adjust the left hand to fit with the right hand”. Now I’m doing it for my kids, except for the tee sparks. It’s amazing to see life from two perspectives. It happens to me so often that I see life from my perspective as a kid, through memories, and my perspective as an adult through my ongoing experience as a father. I can only hope and believe this happens to most people. I pray not to make the same mistakes my parents made, and in the same time I pray and hope that my children will not make the same mistakes that I make with them. When I think of life like this, I only realize more and more that humans fall short and fail many times and it is only God’s grace that helps us get up from our misery and from the consequences of our mistakes and try to keep walking.