Re. [Leica] [img] Photographing a piano quartet

[pklein at 2alpha.net (Peter Klein)]

Kyle, that's not a piano quartet.  It's a quartet of pianos.  *This* is a 
piano quartet, albeit one with an unusually prominent violist:

http://users.2alpha.com/~pklein/musicians/quartet.htm

I see your problem, though. I think you solved it best in the last one 
(vk9). You might have come in closer and a little lower, using just the 
end parts of the nearer two pianos as a frame, which would have made the 
people bigger. Y'know, "part standing for the whole" and that kinda stuff. 
Shorter rung on the stepladder.

The one on the stairs is just a nicely-designed "line 'em up and shoot," 
but says nothing about them being musicians.

So what's with one of the pianists and the convertible and you with the 
wide-angle lens (vk1, vk2. . . and all the other pics in that folder you 
didnt' post links to.

--Peter

Kyle wrote:

> The big problem with photographing a piano quartet is that they alwasy
seem to want their pianos in it. And there are four of them. Which means
you have to get above them really far, or above them with the widest
lens you own, which usually means you've borrowed a ladder from some
carpenter that looks pathetically small when you bring it into the room,
but when you're balanced on top of it and one leg is 1/3 of an inch
shorter than the others, it feels like being strapped on top of a 3 inch
diameter birch tree swinging 40 feet in either direction in a strong
breeze and you're so high up you realize you can see the curvature of
the earth. This just gets worse when you look through the aux finder for
your stupidly wide lens and suddenly the planet is naught but a thin
blue disc hurtling away from you, leaving you lost and alone in space,
with your ladder curving down towards the clouds like one leg of the st.
louis arch....

Then finally you say "Forget this, I'm having a nosebleed. You're not
getting photos of you and your pianos go stand on that staircase and
look musical."


http://www.availabledark.com/~ratty/lj/2007/vk1.jpg
http://www.availabledark.com/~ratty/lj/2007/vk8.jpg
http://www.availabledark.com/~ratty/lj/2007/vk9.jpg