How to take good knife photographs

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ILikeStilettos
Posts: 1576
Joined: Tue Jan 28, 2014 3:36 pm
Location: Norman, Oklahoma, USA
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How to take good knife photographs

Post by ILikeStilettos »

Since I've garnered a lot of positive comments lately about how my photography is dialed in, I thought I would give you a peak behind the scenes. Please consider this as an in-depth tutorial, which you may want to print out for reference/check list.

Here's my high end studio: A bench in the sunroom covered with a piece of remnant green felt. Note that I have temporarily removed my wife's curtains on the one window to admit more light, and get purer "white" light. My regular DLR camera is a Canon SX30 IS. (It's a decent camera, but not the most expensive one on the block.) Most of you probably have an adequate camera, and even the new smart phones are getting very good. I do have a 'polarizer' filter mounted to the lens. (This shot was taken with my Galaxy S6 Active, so that I could get a picture of my regular camera.) The tripod is a standard $30 item I purchased a couple of decades ago. The black object is an SD to USB converter (so I can pull the SD card out of the camera and plug it right into my home computer.) The clear object is a little "plate display" stand that I have 3-4 of. I've learned to put them under the felt to hold a knife at precisely the angle I want. The last item is a $3 roll of Scotch clear shipping tape. That's everything that I use. Please note that this was stuff I already had when I began to work on getting pictures that were acceptable to me. By the way, I use the tape to lift off dusk particles and pet hairs. It's a lot easier to clean my background rather than edit my digital image.

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Along the way I spend a lot of money on things that didn't really help, here's the pile: I spent over $100 on the 'studio tent' and artificial lights (there are 3) which is designed to take away the shadows and reflections and let you use artificial light. It works pretty well if you take the pains to mess with it. Unless you have a huge one, it's really difficult to get everything lined up especially with the big knives I like, and multiple knives. Plus you have to shoot through a slit in the front of the tent which greatly inhibits positioning the camera where you need it. Then there is the IPEVO document camera which really takes great closeups, but has very limited exposure range and no depth of field setting. It's fairly cheap and works pretty well, I even bought a couple as gifts for knife friends and I know John6553 uses one exclusively. I never could get the results I wanted using it.

Then I bought an SD card with built into wireless so I could transfer the pictures directly from the camera to my netbook PC. Again, setups are required and you have to undo them to use the netbook again. It just really complicated life. I have plenty to do when taking pictures and this simply doesn't justify in results enough to use it.

Finally you see a whole bunch of background materials that didn't work. The plaid was too busy, the yellow felt robbed detail from the knives, the red and black silk introduced even more reflections, and if you look closely there's some dark green suede on the top. It is almost black, and succeeds in totally undermining everything I have figured out so far and giving me grossly underexposed pictures. That, by the way, is why I always use the green felt background.

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There are five steps in my process. 1) Take the picture. 2) Move the picture to my PC. 3) Edit and format the picture. 4) Upload the picture to Photobucket. 5) Link the picture to the post. The most critical part is step 1 and it took me a long while to figure out how to get decent pictures for a starting point for everything else. What I am about to say is specific to my camera, but it almost assuredly possible on your camera. You will have to figure out what your camera calls it and pick the correct setting.

Step 1):

Please allow me to digress for a moment. Back in 1970 I had a 35mm Pentax Spotmatic. I had to focus it and set the exposure time and aperture by matching a ± needle in the viewfinder. I learned a lot about photography, but the most important thing was getting enough light on the film to burn a solid image into the emulsion. Second was focus and holding the camera steady. I was told that the best tool to improve your photography was a tripod; everybody shakes some, and the older you get the worse it gets. I always shoot knives with a tripod (even if it's a little table top model for your smart phone). That makes for world's of improvement in sharp pictures. Now in the digital age, cameras try to do a lot of things automatically for you, and for most situations this will give you some kind of adequate picture - but knives have a lot of reflective surfaces. These general purpose settings are probably wrong for this niche in photography. You still want lots of light on the subject. Flashes are great for snap shots, but with shiny knives, they are effectively useless. I'm fully aware that lots of professional photographers do this kind of work with artificial light and it can be done - I'm addressing amateurs like myself and trying to make this as simple as possible.

I studied the documentation for my camera in great detail, and I went over it dozens of times. I finally downloaded it as a PDF file so I could do searches for specific words. I found that important considerations were mentioned in the fine print of a single line. 99% of what follows is about getting adequate light for the image. Many times the 'bad" pictures I see on the forum and auctions are foggy-looking, washed out images. This is due to inadequate light. By shooting in the sunroom with morning or afternoon light, I get plenty. I do have the camera set for "shade" - meaning that it color balances for pure white light, but indirect light. When I shot outside, I had too much light to deal with and the blades disappeared in the glare. The polarizer allows me to rotate the lens and reduce some of the glare. Sometimes it works great, sometimes less so, sometimes not at all. This part of the process is still a crap shoot for me.

The first thing I realized is that my camera has three types of metering (automatic setting of light) called: evaluative (average balance across the entire image), center weighted average, and spot. Average balance doesn't work because you have your long, narrow knife against a contrasting background - you want to bias it toward the brightness of the knife. Spot doesn't work either, because knives have bright and dark spots, it all hinges on what part the spot metering is on. Center weighted gave me the best results, it's an average, but based on what's in the center - my knife. I also found that there was an obscure setting that allowed me to pick between two "centers" - the default small one, and a bigger one. I picked the bigger one, to take in more of the knife.

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Even when I got everything dialed in, I found that I was still getting overexposed and underexposed images. My camera offers "exposure bracketing", where it takes a series of three shots, one in the center, one underexposed, one over exposed. If I have the lighting correct I get three different brightness pictures, one of which is my starting point. If all three pictures seem to look the same, then I have missed big time on the exposure and the camera has done the best that it can. The trick is to be in the middle. Once I began to do this I found that I liked the underexposed pictures best to show the color details of the scales. My camera also allows me to set a center point of the balance so I use -1 ± 2/3, meaning -1.67, -1, and -.33. This is a fairly big range.

As I said, that background is ultra important. You have to find one that works for you.

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Back in the Spotmatic days I learned that as the aperture number went up one "stop" it took twice as long to get the same exposure, however you increased the "depth of field". This simply means that if you focus on the fire button, the scale and the blade are also in focus. If you allow the camera to open up to low stop numbers and admit more light, focus becomes critical. So I set my camera on "aperture preferred" and pick the smallest possible aperture which is the most depth of field. Typically this means I get really long exposures around 1 second or more. Since I am using a tripod, this is not a problem. I typically turn on the self-timer for 10 second delay so that I am not even touching the camera when it shoots the series of three pictures. This one is pesky, I have to remember to turn it back on before every shot; it automatically turns itself off.

This final step practically drove me 'round the bend. My camera offers three different focus philosophies: Normal, Manual and Macro. In the common 'normal' mode I get a white box in the center of my image, and when I press the shutter half-way down it attempts to focus and turns green when ready. The screen below is the manual and macro screen (the macro lacks the scale at the right). I tried manual and found it to be another complicating step. My documentation says the camera focuses to 6" in normal, and 0-6" in macro. The problem was, that in macro I couldn't get the green box and it definitely wasn't in focus in the little enlargement window. By experimentation I found that in macro mode, it doesn't focus until the shutter fires. So you line the shot up, turn on macro (which keeps turning itself off), press the shutter and hope. It works quite well, but I wish they'd covered all this in the manual.

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Step 2:

Turn the camera off and remove the SD card. Insert into the gizmo and plug the gizmo into a USB port. I then copy all the images from the SD card to a folder called "tempknife." I am old school, but there is still a method to my madness. Cameras have the nasty habit of naming photo files with some intelligent file name like "img _20160615_175453.jpg". If I am working on a couple of 13" diamond button swingers I prefer 213db01, 213db02, etc. This becomes beneficial later. Hold that thought for a moment and I will get to the explanation. By copying all the files in "tempknife" and not just dumping them in with all your other photos, you can work with a specific group of shots.

Step 3:

You need a decent quality photo editor. I use Corel Paint Shop Pro, but the free Picasa or Microsoft Photo Editor or just about anything will work. You want to be able to "free rotate" because I'm betting you didn't take the picture at the exact perfect angle. Use "clone brush" to clean up dust spots and "crop" to get your image nicely centered and eliminate any junk in the background. I use a feature called "one step photo fix" which balances brightness and contrast to make a pleasing image. Mostly I don't need it, but when I have badly exposed photos it frequently saves my butt. Rotation also fixes those upside down shots or ones at a 90° angle because you rotated your phone. This last one is critical and I'm guessing it's there in your editor, but you have to find it. On mine it's called resize. I resize to 1000 pixels wide and preserve the "aspect ratio". What the heck is this? Simply, you are going to enlarge or reduce the size of your photo by manipulating the compression. Smart phones are now taking 4000 pixel wide shots. By cutting this to 1000, you reduce the file size by a factor of sixteen (4 x 4). You could just set the phone to a smaller image, but I recommend resizing after you have cropped and rotated and generally cleaned up. Now that you have your edited image, use "save as" to rename it on the fly. This is where I create "213db01.jpg". You may want to file it with your pictures as well. When you have worked the group, everything in "tempknife" can be deleted.

Please note, this resized image is ideal for forums. It avoids all those nasty file size messages you get when you try to upload.

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Step 4 and Step 5:

This one is a bit philosophical. You can attach a photo or four to your forum post, even "place it inline". I find this to be hard to work with especially when I want to flow my text around it or change the order of photos. By sending them to Photobucket (or Flickr, or Google Drive) you upload to a photo server and they can be linked into your post at will.

Photobucket makes it really easy, I just open it and open a file window. Then I highlight the photos I want and drag them from the file window to the photobucket window. They all upload in one swoop. My choice in file names makes them easy to pick out and helps me create the links.

I typically create my post on one forum or the other, than just copy and paste it complete to the other. With linked photos, everything comes across perfectly. With attached photos, I can copy the text, but then I have to do the entire attachment again.

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Take a look at the little snippet of code below. If you were to copy it and change the squiggly brackets {} to square brackets [] and then paste it into one of your posts, you would see the above picture.

{img}http://i765.photobucket.com/albums/xx29 ... 3.jpg{/img}

This is one of several acceptable linking formats; it's also the shortest one and the one which doesn't send your reader off to your photobucket account when he clicks on it. Once I get one picture working correctly, then I copy it multiple times and alter them slightly; photo01, photo02, photo03, etc. This allows me to quickly link in all my pictures and by using preview, I establish that they are all working. If I want to change the sequence of display, I just alter the numbers a bit. This is the major reason for my naming the files the way that I do.

Well that's it, in a somewhat bloated nutshell. As always, your comments and questions are greatly appreciated. Happy posting.

PS I didn't do this to blow my own horn. I did it so that I will get to see more and better pictures of all of your knives!
Dave Sause
oldandfat@cox.net
(405) 694-3690

"And you're telling me this because, somehow, I look like I give a shit?"

"Let a smile be your umbrella and you're gonna get your dumb ass wet."
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john
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Joined: Tue Dec 01, 2009 11:40 am
Location: New England, MA USA

Re: How to take good knife photographs

Post by john »

Dave, you put a lot of work into this topic. Everyone should find at least one tip to help improve the quality of their photos.
Thank you!
Your friend on the web's most friendly community on knives and blades,
John

Massachusetts Where Everything is Illegal or Taxed
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ILikeStilettos
Posts: 1576
Joined: Tue Jan 28, 2014 3:36 pm
Location: Norman, Oklahoma, USA
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Re: How to take good knife photographs

Post by ILikeStilettos »

Prego, Giancarlo.

I'm still working on photos that don't need much - or any - editing. Besides, there are so many guys who need a little help to get over the hump. I want to see their pictures, whatever the quality.

BTW, you play with the CAD program yet?
Dave Sause
oldandfat@cox.net
(405) 694-3690

"And you're telling me this because, somehow, I look like I give a shit?"

"Let a smile be your umbrella and you're gonna get your dumb ass wet."
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JulesVane
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Joined: Sat Apr 01, 2017 12:34 am

Re: How to take good knife photographs

Post by JulesVane »

As a very new member, I sure do appreciate the in-depth info. that is greatly needed to us. I think the very first thing (as a new member), is to figure out how to resize the picture to be able to post it. EVERY picture I've tried is too large and I see (read) others with the same issue. I'm brand new to PhotoBucket. Heard of it, but never needed it as I feel I do now. I'd be happy figuring out how to size and post for starters, then get into my photography skills. Thanks so much for this info...
Image

"By accepting you as you are, I do not necessarily abandon all hope of your improving"- My Wife (1963-Present)
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ILikeStilettos
Posts: 1576
Joined: Tue Jan 28, 2014 3:36 pm
Location: Norman, Oklahoma, USA
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Re: How to take good knife photographs

Post by ILikeStilettos »

You're totally welcome, Chris. John and Don set a high bar for me. It took a while for me to get it clear in my mind and to make a checklist of do's and don't's. So happy you found this old post, even better that it was of use to you.
Dave Sause
oldandfat@cox.net
(405) 694-3690

"And you're telling me this because, somehow, I look like I give a shit?"

"Let a smile be your umbrella and you're gonna get your dumb ass wet."
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