OT Knife Beauty Shots

Lil' Foo · Oct 16, 2006

Thought this might be ok here with some of the recent chat about taking good pics... and this is where I hang out so... let me know if it needs to move.

My girl friend asked me to take some beauty shots of a dagger she picked up... what we're told is its a mid to late 40's German dagger with etched blade... so I set out to experiment.

Two shots (of about 40 or so) came out really nice in my opinion. I’ll tell you the tricks later… beacause capturing the etchings was a challenge! For now, let me know what you think of the shots… and if any of you know anything about the knife, that would be great too.

Here are the main 2 shots…

The drama shot! Nice shadows and depth of field.

The overall shot...

These two are crops and enlargments from the first two shots... but show the grind of the blade, the detail in the etchings, and the company mark. I like the deep contrast and the depth of field that came out!

Thanks for looking!

roppda · Oct 16, 2006

Very nice pictures and well done. I especially like the artistic presentations you chose. I do think they are a little dark for my tastes as a photographer, but I think thats more personal preference. These are tough subjects with the contrast, sheen off the blade, etc. Thanks for sharing.

roppda · Oct 16, 2006

Oh, and I forgot to mention that the depth of field is really impressive.

TurnerIII · Oct 16, 2006

Nice pics - great work with the lights

Of course it would look better w/ your girlfriend ................

Oh-oh-oh sorry. Wrong web page Never mind !!!!

leemovie · Oct 16, 2006

nice composition. I second what roppda said, it's a bit on the dark side.
did you use a digital camera for these? If you did, the white balance was a little bit off IMHO.
Thanks for sharing.

RokJok · Oct 16, 2006

Lil' Foo, thanks for the pics. Check out the knife photography link in my sig below. It's a whole bunch of links to web info on photographing knives.

warning: some of the links haved died since I posted that, though most are still active.

Lil' Foo · Oct 16, 2006

Thanks for all your great comments and feedback!

Me myself, I’m kind of partial to the dark look to the pics. The only way I could get that antique / old world feel I was after. Any more light or brightness just seemed to take away from it.

OK… the details. I used my point & shoot digital, a Sony 7.2 mega-pixel Cyber-Shot. A magnifying glass, red fleece blanket, a chunk of drift wood that I found on some beach a while ago, and of course… the knife.

I used my bathroom counter as the location (lots of ambient light :thumbup: ), sprawled the fleece out with the back rolled up to raise a background and left it somewhat bunched for shadows. I tried the knife in several positions relative to the existing light to try to get the frame up I wanted as well as dealing with the glare. I also tried a variety of additional light sources from a variety of diff angles... a desk lamp, work light, with flash, LED flashlight… All added too much light and too much shine or flare. The shots you see are just from the ambient light above the vanity mirror. The LED flashlight did cause some interesting blue glow on the etching.

Both shots are done in manual mode, flash off, portrait mode… and the rest are the default… it was set to center-weight metering. The 1st shot of the two, the drama shot, was shot thru the magnifying glass… I couldn’t get the depth of field I wanted from the regular camera lens so I though I would experiment with adding a lens. Worked great… I was able to capture the detail of the etchings running up the blade and even some of the detail in the drift wood. I was amazed that it actually worked! The second shot was with the same camera settings and without the magnifying glass.

I learned a lot with this one… considering it was my first “product shot” or knife beauty shot to speak of… I’m pretty happy with them! And most importantly… I had fun doing it!

Hope you all enjoyed!
Foo

roppda · Oct 16, 2006

Did you use a tripod?

Lil' Foo · Oct 16, 2006

roppda said:
Did you use a tripod?

Had one, but didn't use it... I went free hand instead. I think a tripod would have been cumbersome… Once I had the angle and rough frame up of the shot, I had to pivot or swing around the blade by a few degrees to get the right glare pattern on the blade. Make sense?

fellow14 · Oct 17, 2006

Lil' Foo said:
Had one, but didn't use it... I went free hand instead. I think a tripod would have been cumbersome Once I had the angle and rough frame up of the shot, I had to pivot or swing around the blade by a few degrees to get the right glare pattern on the blade. Make sense?

With a nice diffused lighting set up you don't have to worry about the glare issue so much.