recordinghacks



microphone macros

Monday, October 27th, 2008 | by


As part of my mission to organize the world’s microphones, I have been collecting the best photographs of every mic I can find. This is no small feat.

You might think that importing microphones from China is hard work. There’s a language barrier, a cultural barrier, a significant time difference. There are shipping issues, quality control issues, import fees and customs problems, not to mention warehousing, direct sales, shipping, returns… Yes, that does sound hard.

But not nearly as hard as throwing a sample mic into a cardboard box with a couple lamps on each side for a photograph. That must be impossible! Or else all these mic vendors wouldn’t have such lame photographs on their websites.

So, as with this site in general, I find myself picking up the slack. The guys at Strobist promised me a $10 macro photo booth; I took them up on it. I hacked up a big cardboard box, raided the giftwrap supplies in the back of the hall closet for the last of our tissue paper stock, and rigged a couple lamps. It’s not ideal — in fact the lights are completely furchtbar — but to be fair, I haven’t spent the full $10 budget yet.

But hey, custom white balance is my friend. 🙂

Audix D2, D4 Capsule ComparisonMy word for it take, do not. Here’s a sample. See more circuit-and-capsule shots in the mic macros set on Flickr.

I’m also shooting some mics full-frontal style; these end up on T-shirts.

E-V N/D 468 CapsuleTwo last notes:

  • Mic vendors, I’ll shoot all your products for free. You pay shipping both ways; you’ll get back your mics and a CD of high-quality images for a lot less than you’d spend on a photographer. Contact me here.
  • Readers, fans and friends: upload your mic photos to Flickr, and tag them ‘recordinghacks’. I’ll show them here. And if I can use it on a T-shirt, I’ll buy the first shirt for you.

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Posted in Colophon | 2 Comments »




2 Responses to “microphone macros”

  1. det

    October 28th, 2008 at 4:50 pm

    this sounds really ambitious!! great work!!!

    I must say, I’m impress, really, you have to have some sort of fascination for mics

    haven’t you tought on organizing them on some sort of wiki?

    keep up with the good work!!

  2. matthew mcglynn

    October 28th, 2008 at 6:24 pm

    The great thing about wikis is that the community can help build the site. But that idea is not exclusive to wikis. We’ll be adding this capability here too. Also, the recordinghacks mic database stores its data in a structured database, making it more suitable for searching, comparisons, side-by-side presentation, tagging, and so on. Relational database aficionados would be entertained by the infrastructure supporting this system, I think.

    Anyway, thanks for the nice comments.

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