Clarinet Photos, French Horn Photos, and Piano Photos

I'm working on a little project for the piano room. The project requires some black and white photographs of musical instruments. We wanted photos of a piano, a clarinet, and a french horn (because I play the clarinet and Jeff plays the piano and french horn). Sidenote: did y'all know I worked part time in college teaching 6th-9th grade band students? I taught a lot of them individually, and sometimes I taught big groups of them too. Best job ever. People complain about middle school kids, but I absolutely loved them. They were young enough to still be cute and funny, but old enough to have an actual conversation with me. Sometimes I think I should've skipped law school and just continued being a clarinet teacher. $30 an hour wasn't too shabby. I probably would've had to get a music degree eventually though, and I SO don't think that sounds like fun.

Anyway, my initial thought was to just do a Google image search and find some pretty photos and use those. I ended up finding some really beautiful images, and I was all excited. But, this project I'm working on requires me to print said photos in big sizes. Like 11x17 big. Random images from the internet aren't nearly high-res enough to work in 11x17. I probably could've just paid a few dollars for some high-res images somewhere, but I decided to try my hand at some DIY ones instead.

So, I pulled out my clarinet and Jeff's french horn, I covered our couch in a black sheet to use as an impromptu photo studio, and I grabbed my trusty little Canon point-n-shoot.

This is what the French horn looks like.

This is what the clarinet looks like.

And then I took pictures. All sorts of pictures. I took them all in black and white, and I just played around. I went in the piano room and took some of the piano too. Then I loaded them onto the computer, and they actually looked pretty decent. Then I edited them a little and revved up the contrast, and then they looked quite nice!

So, I'm going to go ahead and post them all here in their high-res forms. Hopefully the next person who ends up like me and needs a high-res image of a clarinet will be able to find these on Google images. Feel free to click to enlarge the photos and use them for personal purposes (but no selling them or using them for your business or anything... personal purposes only, mmkay?).

First, the clarinet photos:

LOVE this one!

Then, the piano photos:

Then, the french horn photos:

Isn't this cool looking? I had such fun taking these!

These are the photos where the clarinet and the french horn became friends:

Oh, and I took some of sheet music too just for good measure:

I took all of them with the camera on manual and set to black-and-white. Almost all of them were taken using the macro setting. I'm still not sure which ones I'll end up using, but I have a lot of good options. Also, I'm just going to complain for a second and say that I SO BADLY want a dSLR camera... I feel like I've outgrown my little point and shoot. I don't even remember the last time I took a picture using the auto settings. I take all my photos with the camera switched to manual and I adjust the white balance and everything, but my little camera just doesn't let me adjust some of the things I want to adjust! I need more control! Haha. Also I wish I could switch lenses sometimes... one day I'll get a fancy camera and be so excited. 

But for now, the little old Canon does a pretty decent job. So, which photo is your favorite? Hypothetically, if I were going to blow some up really big and put them on a wall, which one would you pick? Hypothetically, of course... ;o) Oh, and please don't laugh at us for being total band nerds. Band nerds who grew up and dedicated an entire room in their house to music stuff... no laughing!