In reading some other blog last week, I was introduced to ClusterShot. This site offers a convenient way to make your Flickr photos available for sale under a general-purpose royalty-free license. The interface is clean and easy to use both from a photographer’s and buyer’s point of view and the basic idea of the site is excellent so I’ve added 164 of my favourite images there and made them available for sale. Currently they are all set up such that the potential buyer has to make me an offer but I could (and probably will) set up individual photo pricing over time.

I get the feeling that the site is not currently heavily used since, if you search for “texas”, “austin”, “scotland” or “guatemala” currently, you will find that I dominate the rankings.

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Harpsichord, First Presbyterian Church, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

I’m rather enjoying the opportunity to go through all my old shots now that I’ve imported them into Lightroom and am checking all the keywords. The image you see here has an interesting story behind it. It was taken in the sanctuary of First Presbyterian Church in Austin where I was a member for around 10 years. The current church building was built in the early 1970s but elements from the old, downtown church were incorporated into the new building, including a wall of beautiful stained glass along one side of the sanctuary.

The church also had a wonderful music program and ran regular concerts, one of the side effects of which was that you could often find fascinating musical instruments on temporary loan in preparation for some performance or other.
In this case, the fascinating instrument was this gorgeous harpsichord made by Gerald Self of San Antonio.

Given the lighting in the Sanctuary, it wasn’t possible to take a single shot and capture both the stained glass and the detail inside the instrument so I shot several brackets and later masked them together in Photoshop to produce the final image. Rediscovering the original JPEG files this week, however, I pulled them in to Photomatix to see what it would do and I ended up with this rather nice result. The settings I used on this picture were intended to give a pretty natural looking result and I think it worked rather nicely.

If memory serves correctly, the original version of this image was used on the inside cover of the FPC member’s directory for 2005 or thereabouts.