Back in March 2020 the covid lockdown hit the UK. I was still working then but we were sent away from the office, with laptops, and told we would be working from home from that point onwards. We were also restricted to only going outdoors for one hour a day (for excersize), we had to stay local and keep away from anyone else. That left me with a problem, what am I going to photograph?

There was only one answer really and that was still lifes. So I became a baker and photographed cakes. I also dug out some tiny people and other toy characters I had from some previous photo experiments and used those to try and generate some stock images. Some pics were also just for fun.

The image at the top of the page was inspired by an article I’d seen somewhere called ‘The Guitar Apartments Project’. A photographer had photographed the inside of his guitar and the results looked like a luxury apartment.

My guitar needed re-stringing so I thought, whilst I’ve got the sound hole open, I’ll see if I can photograph my own guitar apartment. I wasn’t prepared to take the guitar apart so everything had to go inside the guitar via the sound hole.

I was hoping my 8mm Sanyang ‘fish eye’ lens would be wide enough to capture the inside although I had to fit it to my Fujifilm X-Pro 2 inside the guitar as they wouldn’t go in together. My X-T2 wouldn’t go through the sound hole. I also set the camera to live view, linked back to the Fujifilm App on my ipad, so I could see the view inside the guitar and trigger the shutter.

With the camera assembled inside the guitar, I could see the lens was fine but there wasn’t enough light getting in via the sound hole. The solution was a small LED torch which I placed inside the guitar next to the camera.

It was then all trial and error until I got a look I was happy with. The results were pretty good but I then decided to send in some tiny 00 gauge decorators just to add a bit more interest. The guy walking with the ladder kept falling over so I stuck him in place with a tiny piece of tape. The final thing to do was pull some guitar strings over the sound hole and that was it.

Overall it was really fiddly to do but I was quite happy with the results. I’ve a couple more acoustic guitars so you never know, I might create a few more apartments come re-string time.

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All images: ©Stephen Hyde 2007-2025 – All rights reserved.