Photos taken inside musical instruments

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Did you get the viola/violin/bass right?

Did you read the very last sentence of the article?

It's cool to see how much the older double bass and violin have been repaired. Those square/flat pyramid pieces of wood are cleats, which were added by a luthier to repair and secure cracks.

As the son of a mariner who was born a few miles from HSM Victory, I feel honour bond to point out that HMS Victory is not techically a galleon.

Interesting mix of wood too. The 1619 viola has a very tight grain spruce top and the maple back has a beautiful curl. Same with the 2019 Beilharz cello and the 1785 Storioni violin – the curly maple really shows. The back on the 1705 Goffriller cello seems very plain on the other hand, and suprisingly so does the 1717 Stardivari's. The 19th century Hopf violin has nice curly maple, but the grain on the top seems extremely loose. Any idea how do these compare musically? And does someone know if Stradivarius ever used curly maple and when curly maple was first used for musical instruments?

> if a perfectly symmetrical interior (& exterior - anything contributing to resonances) wouldn't sound better

I'm guessing it would likely look more pure on a frequency plot, but sound sterile if things were perfectly symmetrical. The little imperfections, materials, and design tradeoffs give each instrument its unique tone color (timbre). Often, musicians will chase a certain builder and year, and even within that, only a few instruments will be considered "great". For example, guitarists chasing the perfect Les Paul or most classical violinists chasing a Stradivarius.

In acoustics symmetrical and parallel surfaces lead to what are called standing waves, which heavily emphasizes specific frequencies. For the most part in things that are musical (instruments, recording studios) you don’t want that. Except of course where that’s the whole point, like the heads of a drum.

There’s a lot more subtlety to it, but in general, variation will produce richer more complex timbre.

I remember around 25 years ago being in the big music hall in Philadelphia and feeling a bit like I was inside a giant cello.

The cheapest seats were in the coolest place architecturally because you were right up at the back, closest to the ceiling, which really was a bit like in these instrument photos.

Some pictures here from a quick search: https://voithandmactavish.com/projects/the-kimmel-center/

Imagine a concert hall where the architecture mimics the ribbed interior of a violin or the layered gears of a grand piano action

It's an interesting idea - and I have played with using mirrors. But I run into a few problems: Most mirrors will actually show a faint double image due to the silver being behind the glass. This becomes more pronounced if you're shooting at a steep angle. Single surface mirrors are pricy, and finding one that could slip through the f-holes of a violin is a challenge. Also - if you're outside and pointing in, you're running into some similar issues - the f-holes are simply too thin to telephoto through without them blocking image at least partially - and then you're no longer shooting wide, so you wont see much of the instrument in the reflection anyway.

Sounds plausible, do you have a telephoto and a string instrument (or friends who own the aforementioned)?

The challenge would probably be stability and alignment

Typically, when we photograph small objects at very close range, only a narrow depth of field is in focus. The rest of the image appears blurred. The further other parts of the scene are from the focal plane, the more they blur. This shallow focus helps us to understand scale and depth.

However, in these pictures, the artist has cleverly avoided the blurring effect by combining multiple pictures taken at different focal distances into a single image. The resulting pictures look crisp and clear throughout, and as a result, lacks the usual depth cues we are accustomed to in macro photography. That's why these pictures resemble photographs of large halls!

A similar effect can be observed in ray tracing as well, where we are free to construct entirely imaginary scenes. While defining a scene that we want to be perceived as small, we need to remember to add focal blur [1] carefully. If we forget to do so, the resulting scene can produce the exact opposite impression, that of a vast space.

[1]: https://github.com/susam/pov25#focal-blur

I think that's the most interesting part! From the article:

> Every part of his process is intentional because he doesn't want the images to look like miniatures. The focus stacking helps him avoid the typical aesthetic of macro photography by reducing the amount of background blur and focal compression. Creating an image that looks like it was taken with an ultra-wide-angle lens also results in leading lines we associate with normal-sized things, like streets and buildings, which tricks your brain into thinking the subject is not small. He also uses lighting to make it look like the sun is shining down, emphasizing the feeling that you are standing inside something.

Despite being physically quite close to the subject, the ratio of subject-size-in-frame to distance-to-subject is usually still quite small (the angle of view for macro lenses is generally much smaller than what the focal length at infinity would suggest).

So for us, macro shots tend to have two characteristics: 1.) perspective is approaching an isometric drawing 2.) usually narrow depth of field.

These shots on the other hand were made with a very wide field of view and focus stacking produces a deep depth of field. I'm sure that if you worked out the angles and distances in e.g. the violin shot then the ratios will be basically the same as your typical 2.5 story architecture shot or subway architecture done with something in the 14-20mm FF range. Because the photographer went to great lengths to make it look like that.

There's also other cues, like the height of the camera relative to the floor and ceiling of the room, and of course the light.

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underrated comment.

"A gentleman is a man who can play the accordion, but doesn't."