Portraits and headroom:

One of the most common mistakes I see photographers make is the misuse of headroom.

The bottom line is, don’t leave a lot of space between the top of the subject’s head and the top of the frame. Avoid the tendency to put faces square in the middle of your viewfinder where your focus brackets may be.

In order to capture the emotions of the face, start by getting in as close as you can. At times you may even chop off the tops of a few heads. Unless the sky is particularly amazing or the trees more fantastic than your average set of trees, don’t try and force getting the surroundings into your image. Generally the background should not be more prominent than the subject.

Read more tips at digital-photography-school.com

Take the latest Dave Matthews Band album. It’s recorded digitally and everything on the album can be reproduced and analyzed in the digital domain. Stick with me here. I’m not talking about how a song is actually played, but rather the volume, tonal quality and relationship of all the sounds on the album to each other.

If the band wants to closely reproduce the sound of the record (the “mix” if you will) in a live performance, then why not have the person who used to mix the sound be replaced by a computer that knows what the song is supposed to sound like. Every instrument on stage will soon be introduced into the live sound system either by a digital direct box or a digital microphone. Instead of a human moving faders and twisting knobs, the computer doing the mix will maintain the tonal integrity, relative volumes and dozens of other parameters analyzed from the recorded sound. There will be no problem if the arrangement on stage changes from night to night, because the mixing computer doesn’t really care about how the song is played, only about how it sounds.

Click here to read the entire article.

Not sure what’s causing it but it’s getting this strip of white down the middle. We’re going to the Apple Store Monday to see what’s going on. It’s under warranty so it should be find. I’ll let you know what happens.

During research I learned that guitar tuners wouldn’t work, however I discovered Perfection Planetary Violin Pegs at Musiciansfriend for $69.00. These gems fit the bill to a T. I immediately ordered a set.

Three days later this arrived.

After reading through the instructions I learned that I needed a new tool, a standard tuning peghole reamer. I found that at Stewart-MacDonald for $49.98. The next thing to have on hand was some Gorilla Glue, then the fun could begin.

The first step is remove strings and old tuning pegs, being careful to note the order of the strings and bag them for safekeeping. Next I had to sort the new pegs between the treble and the bass side of the violin, because they actually screw in and the threads are reversed on the treble side.

Now with the peghole reamer I carefully removed a little wood from the holes checking for fit after a couple turns. Very little wood actually needed removed, be very careful because you can’t put the wood back once it is removed. The pegs should fit very tight when screwed in place.

I did this for each tuning peg, cut and size for fit. I numbered each of the pegs to remember exactly which hole it was being fit, because in the next steps the pegs have to be trimmed in length. The peg head of the violin is tapered.

Now its time to trim the length off the pegs. I used a pencil to mark the excess end on the pegs approximately 2mm outside the peg head per the instructions. Then using a very fine modelers saw I cut the ends off each peg.

I then sanded the ends to smooth them up using 220, 400, then 600 grit progressively putting a slight rounding on them.

Now it’s time for final fit and then gluing. The instructions say to slightly moisten the holes with wet Q-tip, put a small bead of Gorilla Glue on the threads of the pegs and final install. I used a rubber band wrapped around the barrel of the peg to get a good grip when screwing them in.

All finished, let the glue dry overnight and restring.

Thanks Chris for the confidence in me to work on your expensive violin and for the challenge in this project.

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