It's the blade you're having troubles with. Blades are difficult because they're very shiny. The more different angles a blade has, the more difficult it is to photograph. (Try taking photos of a kris someday. It will drive you insane.)
I have two questions:
First, does your camera have a separate viewfinder? If so, abandon hope. Problems with reflections and glare on knife blades in photographs are about angles. You've seen this just in looking at a blade. If there's glare, you move your head a few degrees (maybe without thinking about it), and the glare goes away. A few degrees makes all the difference. An inch of separation between the lens you look through to set up the picture and the lens that the picture is actually taken through can translate into a few degrees (especially when you're close up). Those few degrees can spell glare or reflections or dark spots on the blade in the actual picture that weren't there in the viewfinder.
Second, how are you lighting your pictures? Flash? Well then, abandon hope again unless you have professional flash units with "modeling lights." A modeling light is a conventional light bulb that is always on and is mounted right next to the flash tube. Thus, it models the light that the flash will ultimately give only not nearly as bright. without modeling light, you can't know what your flash picture is going to look like until you take it.
The bowie picture on my site that you complimented (thank you) was taken with two thousand watts of "hot lights". Hot lights are non-flash lights that deliver their full brightness all the time so what you see is exactly what you'll get in the finished picture. They're called "hot" because they're very hot to work around. I've taken to wearing a sweat band on my forehead so as not to drip sweat on the set. AC told me once how much light he uses in his shots. It was huge (maybe 5KW as I recall).
Anyway, if you don't want to go to all this trouble, then take advantage of what God gives you for free. Take your pictures outside between about 10am and 2pm on overcast days. On these perfect days (like Saturday was here), you get perfectly diffused, non-directional, color perfect (for "daylight" flims anyway) light.
I think it was in the General Forum or maybe the Gallery forum just in the last week or so that Terrill Hoffman (the man with many letters in his name) who is also a well-know professional knife photographer, posted some pictures of his favorite setup. Judging from the size of the power pack sitting on the floor, it looks like he's using a few thousand watts of professional flash gear. But, there's some good tips there anyway.
As I said in one of my other posts, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.
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Chuck
Balisongs -- because it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing!
http://www.balisongcollector.com
