Steve Stevens shot to fame in the early eighties as the lightning-bright guitarist for Billy Idol. Co-writing hits like Idol's "Rebel Yell", collaborating with Michael Jackson on "Dirty Diana", and racking up a Grammy for his epic, sweeping "Top Gun Anthem" for the Top Gun soundtrack assured him of Guitar God status. So when he asked me to photograph his massive 50+ collection of guitars I jumped at the chance. I had photographed Steve in concert many times before, but this shoot was especially appealing to me as I am also an avid guitar buff. His collection includes his 1980's Charvel "workhorse" (used on nearly all of his 80's recordings), a rare 1973 Ramirez acoustic, and several one-of-a-kind custom mades.

We decided to divide the shoot between Steve's Los Angeles apartment and his nearby storage facility, saving both the transportation of a truckload of guitars to my loft as well as valuable setup time. All rock stars have a generous supply of beautiful women, so Steve also supplied our 2 models for the day.

Since the primary use of the photographs would be for a Flash presentation for Steve's web site, I chose to use a Canon 10D (a camera I was testing at the time). The 10D produced relatively small file size but could deliver a good 8x10 print if needed. I rotated use of 2 Lexar 512MB 40X cards, running them through a Lexar firewire card reader into my 12" G4 Powerbook. With this setup we were able to shoot 3 sets of guitars, view them in Photo Mechanic during wardrobe changes, and move on to the next. In the end we were able to complete the entire 2-location shoot in just under 4 hours, averaging less than 5 minutes per shot.

The lighting was extremely simple. I shot half of the pictures on Steve's patio using white seamless background paper as my backdrop. The southern facing patio produced beautiful light from the overcast day but it was a bit flat, so I bumped it up slightly with a medium Photoflex Multidome with a 600WS strobe head placed just to the right of the camera. Don't underestimate the beauty of an overcast day combined with a clean white background, even without a flash. Grab some background paper and try it for yourself!

The interiors were shot using a single on-camera Canon 55OEX strobe set on ETTL. The contrasty lighting added to the gritty, voyeuristic look we were aiming for and Steve's road cases provided a nice backdrop.

Upon returning to my home workstation, I ingested all the shots into Photo Mechanic for captioning and editing, made my usual curves, noise, and sharpening adjustments in Photoshop, and finally cataloged all the images in Extensis Portfolio. Later in the week when the Flash slideshow transitions were finished, Steve recorded one of his award-winning soundtracks to lay over the completed project.

Some of the shots were subsequently used as advertising and PR for guitar companies including the Dean Guitars USA Cadillac model.

You can view the Flash slideshow, hear the soundtrack and see the guitar ads at www.DavidHonlPhoto.com

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