Photography question

SVanderkolff

SVanderkolff

Joined
Oct 31, 2002
Messages
979
I am trying to get a good picture of a 14 1/2" knife. I think my biggest problem may be my distance from the knife. How far from the knife would you position the camera for a knife that size. Mirror polish black handle
Thanks
Steve
 
There are a lot of factors that go into taking a picture, lighting, flash on or off, focus of the lens, zoom of the lens, all these factors add up. I would just experiment and find what works, if the problem is the flash making the blade appear overly shiny and taking away from the handles try different lighting and maybe turning the knife on an angle. Good luck :thumbup:
 
There are others on here who take much better pictures than I do, but....

I assume you are using a digital camera. Try turning the macro function on and you may get better lighting if you turn the flash off and go outside for some good old natural light. I generally try different zoom settings and take a bunch of photos then upload them to my computer to see which is the best. The other thing is you may want to take a fairly high quality pic and then resize it in your computer down to 800X??? after cropping. Good luck.
 
I would suggest about 4' and then use your zoom to crop. An overcast day would be the best for lighting.

One of the most difficult things to light are shiny objects and the reasons are two fold: One, you pick up all the surrounding environment as a reflection which can hide the curves you may want to illustrate and two, specular (point source) lighting results in shadows and highlights where you may not want them.

The proper way to light a shiny object is to use Tent Lighting. Tent lighting will allow you to introduce subtle lighting changes, yet still avoid harsh shadows.

Now here is a trick that they don't teach at photography school. On one inner side of one tent panel (any one of the four vertical panels), paint a 3" wide band of black, running from top to bottom. This will result in a darker area reflected from the shiny subject, which will follow the contours of the knife and introduce 'modeling', which will result in an attractive effect. As always, some experimenting is necessary with light placement and line width, but 3" should work fine.
 
I am using a home made light tent and a Nikon D50 camera. I have the camera about 2' above the knife and the pictures are simply not turning out. I will try to get further away from the knife and see if that works.
Thanks
Steve
 
If you feel like posting a pic of your setup and a sample pic, I may be able to get a better handle on it, Steve. Or, you can just email me some images.
 
I never hear that distance in any way could be a problem. I usually position camera to have one or other composition on the picture and may choose close or far distance and different zoom.

How distance possible may affect picture?

If you do not have enough light then exposition will be longer and so you need to put camera on tripod and use remote control.

Light disposition is usual mistake for many, even for professional photographers.

For knife you need 3 light sources. Two lighting sides to make handle detail visible, and one filling light. Also for blade you need white screen which should be positioned and lighten the way so it will be reflected in blade and edge, better light it with gradient so different planes of the blade (grinds) will be darker or lighter, depends on what you want to show.

This is pretty big knife and distance was about three feet I guess, but to my understanding it does not really matter to much:

RosArms-Fox-II-01.jpg


Thanks, Vassili.
 
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