Bronwen's Violin

Bronwen Marsden
Guest Blog

The violin was made in 1904, and played by my great-great-aunt as she studied. My grandmother gave it to me when I was big enough to play it, and I studied with it too. It's a beautiful instrument – unusual wood grain patterns on its back, varnish that's deepened to dark amber over the years. Its tone is surprisingly rich, for an inexpensive student violin. It has a wolf note on the D string F sharp, though, which made it unusable in RCM exams. I had to pull out my cheap (and, by comparison, garishly red) modern violin when I went in for my exam. It was ugly, but at least it could play all the notes.

I haven't played it in years. I put new strings on it three, maybe four years ago, but I never even got so far as tuning it. I was never any good at it, anyway.

Addendum
Technical Information

While I have always been a stickler for accuracy in my photography I am aware that the moment I point a camera on anybody there will be a change that I cannot control. I see the person as I want to see the person. But what I see must inevitably be what the person wants or thinks I must see. Any portrait, then is the result of sparring session in which there are no winners. What we see in the end must be a collaboration. Or you could say that it is a double failure. I may think that I captured the person when their guards were down due to my "self-perceived" skill and the person may be revealing something they think I see in them which they don't see and yet... I could go on and on with how impossible it is to take realistic portrait of anybody.

On the other hand, Of late I have been abandoning my stickiness for accuracy in colour reproduction. These pictures might seem odd to some because they are odd. I used Fuji 1600 colour negative film with my Nikon FM-2 and a 50mm lens. I used the modeling light of one quartz powered modeling light that is surrounded by a flash I chose not to use. The film is balanced for daylight which is somewhere around 5500 Degrees Kelvin. The colour temperature of my quartz light should be 3200 Kelvin but because of its age it is probably closer to 3000. The white rip-stop nylon of my 32 year-old 2x3 ft Chimira softbox has yellowed with time. All this adds to an off colour scan of the negative into the realm of yellow, cyan and green. It is virtually impossible to correct the scan to an absolute and all I can do (to my new-found delight) is to offer an interpretation that might be a tad yellow or blue or too red. Whatever the innacuracy nothing can detract from the beauty of Bronwen Marsden, she of the sensual pout.