1.  The Guild Surfliner is a retro designed affordable guitar by one of the classic companies. Guild have been making superb instruments since the early 1950's and are particularly known for their acoustics and semi acoustics. However in the past they did make this.


    This is the S-200 T-Bird, so compared to this the Surfliner is relatively conventional!! 

    I like the Surfliner, I think it looks great and it certainly sounds great. There are three switches that turn on each of the pickups, giving the possibility of 7 different combinations, so it's pretty versatile. It does have a pretty chunky neck, which is not something I particularly like, but I seem to get round it well enough. 

    Now this is my first ever Guild guitar and I really like the unusual design. There are a lot of guitars like this appearing these days and I think that is a good thing, since everything doesn't have to be based on those early 50's Fenders and Gibsons. 

    As to the sound. As with the Squier Paranormal Supersonic I recorded an album with it. 



    So overall this is a success I think. Guild have made a relatively cheap guitar that has a lot of style and a nice set of tonal variation. For around £340 you get a very well made instrument that looks good, sounds good and plays good. Whats not to like?

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  2. This is the Fender Squier Paranormal Series Supersonic guitar. Reverse headstock and all certainly one of the more bizarre guitar shapes ever. Now you are going to love this design or hate it. I bought it, so it's obvious that I love it. It is pretty much a left handed guitar flipped around. And it's part of the Paranormal series, which is Fender's idea of guitars with a difference. For me this is a good thing as guitar design hasn't really moved on from the 1950's.

    It looks good, it plays good and it sounds good as far as I'm concerned and it feels very different when I'm using it. It also has two things that add to that difference. It's a short scale guitar and it has a very narrow neck. I have small hands and fingers so that appeals to me. It also has no tone controls. The two knobs are volume controls for eack pickup. 

    Now I decided to give it a good workout by recording an album with it.


    As you can hear I use a lot of effects, but there are some sections with a clean sound. I am somewhat different in how I approach electric guitar. I've been playing the instrument for 60 years. After all that time I've not developed any particular preferences. I am happy using a rosewood or maple neck, using humbuckers, P 90's or single coil pickups. I've used heavy and light guitars, Fenders, Gibsons, Gretch, Guild and even put together a 'Partscaster'. Using different types of guitars and pickups gives me different sounds, but when the pedals and effects get turned on, everything pretty much sounds the same.

    I'm always amused when one those YouTube reviews talks about 'tones' they then switch on some fuzz/overdrive that completely obliterates any subtle differences. I'm afraid I'm one of those who thinks that wood in an electric guitars makes no difference whatsoever. This was further demonstrated to me by someone who made a strat type guitar out of concrete. It sounded exactly like a strat. I also don't think the pickups make much difference either, apart from volume and depth. Though that can be fixed by making a few adjustments on an amp or via a mixer. I would however like to make it clear that acoustic guitars are completely different. These are stand alone musical instruments and don't use the somewhat crude ways to get an electric guitar to make a sound.

    As to the music, this is my take on fusion music, coming from a rock background rather than jazz. I also believe in total improvisation and have no idea what I'm going to do when I sit down to create some music. Hopefully some might find it interesting, however I am aware that some might consider it complete rubbish! I can understand that and I do acknowledge that it is an acquired taste!!!

    A final word on the Supersonic. That is also an acquired taste and it certainly is an opinion splitter. If possible try one out and if you can't, buy it from dealer where you can return it. I'm going to have a lot of fun with mine, but that's my personal taste. Not everybody wants to use something that different.




     






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    I've had this on off relationship with the Nikon Df. This is the 3rd. one I've bought. I sold the first two and always regretted it. It is a 16MP full frame camera and for me has the sharpest images of any Nikon camera I've used. It never got a good press when it was released, which I really didn't understand because of that wonderful image quality. 16MP really doesn't matter as when run through Photoshops Super Resolution function the image quality is still outstanding. 

    It is of course a DSLR, a soon to be extinct kind of camera,which is sad to see. I see no reason to make every camera mirrorless personally as I like using DSLR's, but I fear I am in the minority. The whole DSLR / F mount lens range seems to be phased out as far as Nikon is concerned is not a move to better cameras as far as I'm concerned And while the Z9 is a fabulous camera, there are those of us who still love that DSLR 'clunk'.

    Regarding the Df it seems however that it is still valued by many photographers. You have to pay £1000+ to get one of these S/H, which is what I paid for the above camera. However it had a very low shutter count and looks mint, ao I'm hoping it will keep going for a while. I love the non electronic viewfinder and the phenomenal battery life. However there are a couple of issues.

    The grip is awful. However as you can see I have a couple of grips for the camera, which I managed to hunt down on the internet. So now it handles fine. Another problem is that the info. bar in the viewfinder doesn't work great in bright sunshine, as it's very difficult to see. Yesterday I was working with the voigtlander 90mm f/2.8 sl ii-s apo-skopar nikon f mount lens and using the Nikon green dot manual focusing method had some problems. I did get great results, but it wasn't easy.















    It is every camera manufacturers interest to keep us buying new cameras and not keep using the old stuff. However too often we miss the quality that some older cameras give is and newer is not always better. Nikon have never released a Df2 and I don't think they ever will. Their retro offering is now the Nikon Z fc. Now I have one of those as well (post coming soon) and it's a fabulous camera with a number of third party retro lenses which are great fun to use. 

    The Df is, as far as Nikon are concerned redundant, partly based on the undeserved negative reviews it got. Once bitten twice shy. However the camera obviously has it's fans because of it's high S/H price. And I am definitely one of those. It's (mostly) fun to use and I'm always blown away by the superb images it produces. (It's great in low light as well) So I'm planning to keep this one.











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    First of all an explanation of why it's taken so long for me to post again. As you may have guessed there have been some family issues, involving doctors and hospitals. Nothing life threatening but complicated and time consuming. However I now feel able to resume the blog and I will be posting again on photography and music, my two passions in life. 

    Firstly a couple of links to some new music I have produced -

    https://soundcloud.com/david-taylor-hughes/sets/make-a-note

    https://soundcloud.com/david-taylor-hughes/sets/the-last-chord

    Above are the last three guitars I have bought. You may be aware they are all 'offset' guitars. i.e. non symmetrical. They seem to be in vogue currently and are usually derived from earlier (and usually not very popular) designs. Left to right in the top pictures are a Fender Jazzmaster clone from Harley Benton, a Guild Surfliner and a Squier (by Fender) Starcaster. 

    Offset guitars are not everybody's first choice. I mostly like them myself, with some exceptions. I'm not a fan of Gibson Firebirds or Explorers for example, as I find them very difficult to play. But generally I find them intriguing and something different. As to the three guitars above there is a specific advantage, they are cheap!!!! All three cost me less than £1000, letting me add to my small (but perfectly formed) guitar collection. This of course means I have more sound choices for my library music.

    I am not going to do any kind of review because there are lots out there. And the last thing you probably want is me talking to camera, playing the same old licks and doing sample tones which usually means turning on some fuzz box and thrashing away for several minutes!!

    What I would say is that for relatively cheap guitars they look good, play good aand sound good. These days with the lack of musical instrument shops, it's becoming more and more difficult to try guitars out. Buying stuff online is certainly more convenient and often cheaper, but you never know what you are going to get. In fact I had to do some fret smoothing on the 'Jazzmaster', but it only took me ½ hour and now it feels just fine. 

    New guitars always tend to 'freshen up' my playing and give me a different perspective on what I'm playing and I'm particularly impressed by the Starcaster as it's a joy to play. So hopefully these guitars will add some new ideas and new pleasures to my playing. 






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  5. I haven't posted for over three months. The main reason is that my wife has had some injury problems and I have been looking after her. The secondary reason is that I have been changing some things around regarding my photography equipment. And the main reason for that is I am shooting a lot more video. This is obviously the way things are going. With the constant improvement in internet speed, computers and phones it is now much more possible to publish video content without the viewing platforms grinding to a halt. So, with some exceptions, my gear reflects that change. With the purchase of an an iPhone 13 Pro and a Panasonic Lumix GH6 I now have the capability to shoot high quality footage. Plus switching to using Final Cut Pro on an M chip Macbook editing does not take so long.


    So here's an example shot with the iPhone 13 using the Filmic Pro app. in Panoramic wide screen Cinematic mode. As you can see the quality is terrific. This was also shot hand held, so you can see just how good the stabilisation is. All from something that I can keep in my pocket. 

    While the video has definitely improved on the latest iPhone, the stills have remained pretty much the same. There is now an Apple raw format, which marginally improves things, but on the whole the stills output is OK, but nothing more than that. it seems that the small sensor is more suitable for video. 

    More later. 





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    The Harley Benton TE-20HH SBK Standard Series guitar is amazing. It costs £82 and can be bought here - https://www.thomann.de/gb/harley_benton_te_20hh_sbk_standard_series.htm

    Firstly it looks great. It's all matt black, including the neck and it has a really nice tortoiseshell scratchplate. Secondly and most important, it plays great and sounds great. I used it on this track.

    https://soundcloud.com/david-taylor-hughes/04-sugar-crack?in=david-taylor-hughes/sets/rock-fusion-disk-1

    As you can hear those humbuckers have a real bite to them. Admittedly I'm playing it through a rather splendid Blackstar overdrive pedal, but even so it sounds great. OK, so it's not 100% perfect - the frets could do with a bit of dressing and I will probably replace the tuners with some locking ones. But this is £82 ($108 - €98) after all. I would also point out that it's also very light.

    This shows that these days it's not that expensive to create an excellent playable guitar for a fraction of the prices that companies like Fender and Gibson charge. And I've had expensive guitars in the past that are worse than this. If you don't know who Harley Benton are see - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harley_Benton

    As many of you know in addition to doing stock photography and video, I also compose and play stock music - see https://www.pond5.com/artist/instantclassix?tab=music and part of what I need to do is produce music in as many styles as possible. It also helps to have different sounding guitars. Companies like Harley Benton help me do that without costing me a fortune. 

    So if you are looking for a starter guitar, or a backup guitar I have no hesitation in recommending the Harley Benton TE-20HH SBK Standard Series guitar. For the money it's simply unbeatable.




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    Selfies are horrible. They are narcissistic snapshots from people who actually think that they are important. We get the horrors of Instagram and other social media platforms full of people who actually think that their lives are relevant and that they are more interesting than their surroundings. They are the visual ramblings of people so disassociated from the real world that they can only focus on themselves at the expense of everyone around them. And they are nothing to do with photography.

    As far as I am concerned I have never taken a selfie and never will. The idea of putting myself in front of a scenic place, or an event or another person or group of people and grinning inanely into the lens strikes me as one of the worst things that the human race is involved in. It's an activity for losers, morons and the intellectually challenged. It has created other hideous uses of cameras including the awful TikTok. 

    We now have a self obsessed society that has all but eliminated creativity. (Just listen to the woeful bleating that passes for pop music these days if you don't believe me) At this moment in time a barely sane dictator is attempting to slaughter the population of a country that was never a threat. We are seeing truly dreadful images coming out of Ukraine showing just what a camera can do to show us the world. Yet there are billions living some kind of pathetic virtual life using their smartphones in an attempt to 'get a life' and ignoring it completely.

    If the selfie was used to show us the world and what goes on there, then they might be useful. Instead we get a whole pile of nothing clogging up the worlds bandwidth and filling the worlds servers with complete drivel. There is no problem with using smartphone cameras, I do it all the time. And used in the right way they can show us the state of the world that others would rather we not see. No, the problem is not with the phones, the problem is with the users. 





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    An unremarkable stock image, shot on my Fuji X-Pro 111. However it is huge. It's 8000 pixels longest size and around 42MP. Which is bigger than the 26MP that came off the Fuji. It is also pin sharp. It was created using the enhance function in Adobe Photoshop Raw. Now this was always very impressive. (And do not believe people who say it isn't. They are are either lying or working for one of Adobes competitors) However this always took a very long time. Not any more. My Intel Macbook recently died and I've replaced it with the cheapest alternative I could find, a refurbished Macbook Air with 8MG of ram and a 256MB hard drive. And now the creation of a super resolution enhanced raw file takes 10 seconds, instead of nearly a minute. Now this not that much different to Olympus and Panasonics stacked images, high resolution functions. 

    And of course this is much more useful. I can shoot normally with my Fuji's and not have to wait while the camera creates the image. I was looking at the new Panasonic G6, which is VERY impressive, but realised that I would be paying for a lot of functions I didn't need. i.e. Video. The Adobe enhance function is in both Photoshop and Lightroom now, so it is available to most photographers. However you will need a fast computer to avoid waiting for it to create the file. 

    The new M1 chip Macs are indeed amazing. I now have two. The Macbook Air and a Mac Mini, which I use for music. The Mini is in fact the cheapest computer I've ever used and also the best. Astonishing. The software does in fact create a much larger image than the one at the top of the page, but most picture libraries won't accept files that big, so i reduce the size.

    What of course this all means is there is absolutely no need to keep upgrading cameras just to get a higher pixel count. No need for 50MP+ files, no need for MF cameras. I checked out the results from my Fuji AP-S sensors using Adobe enhance against raw samples from the Fuji 100MP medium format cameras and I was hard pressed to see any difference. Now there may well be a difference if you print the size of a wall, but how ofter do we do that? I see great advantages from this Adobe software. It means I can use cameras I like without having to continually upgrade to get better quality. 

    I repeat again, the Adobe enhance high resolution software is spectacular. For me it's the greatest advance in digital photography in the past few years. It turns your run of the mill cameras into high resolution monsters, capable of incredible results. Why more people don't use it and rave about it bewilders me. I make my living from photography and never use anything that compromises quality and certainly the Adobe enhance high resolution software is no compromise at all.

    There is also another use of this software and this is with smartphone cameras. The image below is the same size as the Fuji X-Pro 111 image at the top. Shot using my iPhone 13 in Apple Pro Raw mode using the 13mm (35mm equivalent) lens. And no it's not as good as the Fuji image, but is still capable for high resolution reproduction. A bonus for those who are looking for the best results from smartphone sensors and lenses.





















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    I recently saw an add for a 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard priced at £329,065.10. (I wonder where the 10 pence came from??) It was of course battered and belonged to some guitarist who apparently played with Paul Mcartney and Etta James. (I've never heard of him) Now who on earth buys instruments like this? Is it rock stars adding to their collections? Bankers buying it as an investment? It's certainly not your average musician. All of this pales into insignificance when you realise that the highest price ever paid for a vintage guitar is 3.9 Million Dollars for a Black Fender Stratocaster owned by David Gilmour, the guitarist with the Pink Floyd. It was bought by the owner of an American football team. It was actually at a charity auction and the money went to an environmental group, so it could be said that while it was bought by someone with too much money as some kind of status symbol, at least the money went to a good cause. 

    Personally, I have no interest in vintage guitars, previously owned by someone else. (Which is probably a good job since I can't afford them!!) I really can't see the point of buying an instrument that has been handled by god knows who, god knows where. I want a guitar that I have used, I have played and is part of my musical history, not anybody else's. I also believe that it's a complete myth that these old electric guitars sound better and play better. Now a vintage acoustic may (and I mean may) have some interesting acoustic properties that have improved over the years, though I'm a bit skeptical about that as well. But vintage electrics usually need a lot of work and of course if they are basically rebuilt they lose that vintage status. 

    As I indicated this is not a problem I will encounter anyway because these instruments are priced way beyond my income. There is also the point that while guitar shapes have remained the same for years and that Fender Telecasters, Fender Stratocasters, Gibson Les Pauls and Gibson 335's are still very popular, things like pickups, tuners and how woods used are constructed have all moved on. And it's certainly true that at the cheaper end of the market, 'starter' or 'beginner' models have improved significantly. There is also the myth that somehow these vintage guitars have history that goes with them. They were played by somebody famous or used on such and such famous album. For me they only carry the history of sweat, stale beer and god knows what else. If you think somehow that this history will rub off on your playing then think again. The only reason that guitars sound good is who is playing them. Everything else is a fantasy. 

    However, I suspect that none of this will go away. There will be lots of cooing and bragging about the ownership of vintage guitars. Just the same as with vintage anything. Personally I think that what is really important is the music that these instruments helped (marginally) to create. And we should treasure the musicians who made that music, rather some lump of wood and metal that they used. 















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  10.  iPHONE 13 Pro









    I bought the iPhone Pro a few weeks ago and I've used nothing else since. 




















































    As you can see it produces images with nice punchy colours and decent dynamic range. In terms of my library stock work it's ideal. So why have I used it so much?

    • It's so light and convenient compared to my Fuji mirrorless cameras.
    • It has 3 decent lenses. In 35mm terms a 13mm, 26mm and 77mm.
    • I can now shoot .DNG files with it. Whether they are genuine raw files I cannot say but they certainly offer more flexibility in Photoshop processing.
    • It's silent and fast. It can capture an express train travelling at speed at precisely the moment I want.
    • Apple have decided to keep the 12MP image size. However the files upsize nicely.
    Now it isn't as good in terms of image quality as my Fuji's, but it is pretty good and there would be no problem in terms of reproduction up to quite large sizes. So this is my camera of the year.



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