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- Sep 25, 2019
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If you’re a knife maker you’ve either done your own photography or have paid to have photos of your knives taken. Whatever the case, you might find it interesting to see what goes on behind the scenes. And for those of you who have paid (maybe big bucks), this post might clear up why photography can be so expensive.
I’ve been a photographer for far longer than I’ve been a knife maker, and so I’ve collected a lot of photography equipment and experience that many other knife makers might not have. You’ll see a lot of it in this post, and you might think “I can’t do that; I don’t own that equipment”. But this post is NOT meant to be a tutorial. It’s meant to give you a better idea of what goes on behind the lens and why it costs a lot of money to have high quality images of your work taken. The bottom line is that it takes a great deal of time and a lot of experience.
NOTE: You can take quite good photos on your cell phone with minimal lighting and some filters applied. This is probably the best solution for most people. What you’ll see below are what are called “hero shots”, meaning they are meant to showcase the product in question in the highest possible quality. These sorts of images are what you might want if you’re taking out ad space in a magazine, or are doing shots of a product line for your website.
Here are the photos in question:
The first two images are intended to show the general shapes and materials of the knife in question. In our age of e-shopping, you know how important a high quality, reliable image is. In addition to looking good though the shot should show the actual contours of the knife from several angles, and the lighting should allow the buyer to see what the materials look like (wood grain should be clear, spacer material should be obvious, etc.
The last shot was meant to showcase the packaging, as well as a third angle of the knife.
Here’s the setup for shot one and two:
And shot three:
For shots 1&2: There are two lights, one key light (main lighting) and one fill light, both at different intensities. The camera is slaved to the computer to get a more accurate, on-the-fly idea of what the shot looks like. There’s also a white card to reflect a little more light into certain parts of the image.
Here’s where it gets fun: the depth-of-field, or the distance inside the photo that will be in focus, was pretty small, meaning that a portion of the knife would have been nice and sharp but the rest would have been blurry. To fix this I used what’s called focus stacking, meaning that a number of different shots were taken where everything was the exact same (lighting, etc), but the only thing that differed was where the focus point was. Then the images were all combined in photoshop to get a single image made up of the many, and the result was one image that was in focus from front to back. In addition to this, a number of images were taken where everything was the same except for the lighting intensity. Those images were then combined in photoshop to create a single shot that was well lit in the shadows and in the highlights. All in all these two photos were made up of about 24 separate images each, all layered together in photoshop and then painstakingly recreated to form one image.
For shot 3: One main light, one fill light, and a number of cards used mostly to decrease the intensity of the light in certain areas of the image. The closer you can get the image in-camera, the less work you have to do in the editing stage (though there’s always a lot to do). And that’s where a lot of the work is, in fact. It took maybe an hour to set up the shots, and then another two hours of shooting to get everything the way I wanted it. About another two to three hours were spent in front of the computer editing them to look the way you see then here. Here’s very roughly what the images would have looked like after being combined into photoshop but before editing:
There are a lot of very small details which you don't see but have to be edited in order to make the photo look good. Dust, for example, has to be removed from every surface, one speck at a time (dusting everything beforehand helps). There are also stray hairs in the fur to be removed, small differenced in lighting to be smoothed out, etc.
Hopefully that gives a rough idea of what goes into shooting images like these ones, and why photography can cost a lot of money depending on who you’re hiring (and in fact, who you are...a photographer would charge a large-scale maker, like Cold Steel, a lot more for the exact same images than they would charge a small maker, for various reasons).
Hope you guys find this interesting!
I’ve been a photographer for far longer than I’ve been a knife maker, and so I’ve collected a lot of photography equipment and experience that many other knife makers might not have. You’ll see a lot of it in this post, and you might think “I can’t do that; I don’t own that equipment”. But this post is NOT meant to be a tutorial. It’s meant to give you a better idea of what goes on behind the lens and why it costs a lot of money to have high quality images of your work taken. The bottom line is that it takes a great deal of time and a lot of experience.
NOTE: You can take quite good photos on your cell phone with minimal lighting and some filters applied. This is probably the best solution for most people. What you’ll see below are what are called “hero shots”, meaning they are meant to showcase the product in question in the highest possible quality. These sorts of images are what you might want if you’re taking out ad space in a magazine, or are doing shots of a product line for your website.
Here are the photos in question:
The first two images are intended to show the general shapes and materials of the knife in question. In our age of e-shopping, you know how important a high quality, reliable image is. In addition to looking good though the shot should show the actual contours of the knife from several angles, and the lighting should allow the buyer to see what the materials look like (wood grain should be clear, spacer material should be obvious, etc.
The last shot was meant to showcase the packaging, as well as a third angle of the knife.
Here’s the setup for shot one and two:
And shot three:
For shots 1&2: There are two lights, one key light (main lighting) and one fill light, both at different intensities. The camera is slaved to the computer to get a more accurate, on-the-fly idea of what the shot looks like. There’s also a white card to reflect a little more light into certain parts of the image.
Here’s where it gets fun: the depth-of-field, or the distance inside the photo that will be in focus, was pretty small, meaning that a portion of the knife would have been nice and sharp but the rest would have been blurry. To fix this I used what’s called focus stacking, meaning that a number of different shots were taken where everything was the exact same (lighting, etc), but the only thing that differed was where the focus point was. Then the images were all combined in photoshop to get a single image made up of the many, and the result was one image that was in focus from front to back. In addition to this, a number of images were taken where everything was the same except for the lighting intensity. Those images were then combined in photoshop to create a single shot that was well lit in the shadows and in the highlights. All in all these two photos were made up of about 24 separate images each, all layered together in photoshop and then painstakingly recreated to form one image.
For shot 3: One main light, one fill light, and a number of cards used mostly to decrease the intensity of the light in certain areas of the image. The closer you can get the image in-camera, the less work you have to do in the editing stage (though there’s always a lot to do). And that’s where a lot of the work is, in fact. It took maybe an hour to set up the shots, and then another two hours of shooting to get everything the way I wanted it. About another two to three hours were spent in front of the computer editing them to look the way you see then here. Here’s very roughly what the images would have looked like after being combined into photoshop but before editing:
There are a lot of very small details which you don't see but have to be edited in order to make the photo look good. Dust, for example, has to be removed from every surface, one speck at a time (dusting everything beforehand helps). There are also stray hairs in the fur to be removed, small differenced in lighting to be smoothed out, etc.
Hopefully that gives a rough idea of what goes into shooting images like these ones, and why photography can cost a lot of money depending on who you’re hiring (and in fact, who you are...a photographer would charge a large-scale maker, like Cold Steel, a lot more for the exact same images than they would charge a small maker, for various reasons).
Hope you guys find this interesting!
