Hi Daniel,
My most generic comments first:
- You already know that I really like the look of the santuko itself. It looks like it would be a great addition to anybody's kitchen. The beauty offered by the woodgrain & blade shape is nicely set off by the contrasting spacers set at an angle the flows easily into the surrounding knife parts. The shape and colors of the knife, especially the handle, makes it appealing as a photo subject.
- IMHO a lighter background surface would reduce some of the trouble I had with shadows. On some of the shots it became difficult to see where in the shadowed areas of the frame the knife ended and the background began. Note that this is a very VERY common problem in knife photos or shots of other objects laying directly on the background. The solution is to cast a bit of light into those deeply shadowed areas with either another light source or a reflector.
I assume the background used in these pictures is a cutting board. Using one made of light-colored maple wood would have bounced some of the available light back onto the knife parts, thereby reducing the loss of subject edge integrity in the shadows. However, be aware that I am VERY biased toward the intrinsic beauty of wood in almost any object. YMMV.
On most of the shots I liked your use of diagonal composition. The old rule of thumb is that diagonals are more dynamic (read "interesting") than strictly vertical & horizontal lines, and that circles are even more dynamic than diagonals. Note that you can achieve diagonal or circular composition with vertical/horizontal lines (or vice versa) through the use of repetition and patterning within the frame.
Likewise, most of your shots have parts of the knife running off the edge of the frame, thereby achieving the anchoring I was talking about in the link to CKD. The two shots you have that don't have physical anchoring to the frame edge are the one with the text and the one showing the full left side of the knife.
On the shot with the text, the space-filling achieved with the cucumber and word sizing & placement serves to keep the eye moving around in the frame. The induced eye movement seems to bump into the upper- & lower-right edges of the frame mostly, which yields a virtual anchoring to those edges even though the text elements aren't physically touching those edges. I suspect that in moving from one text block to another the eye overshoots the target and thus contacts the frame ege, then makes the micro-jump back onto the text to actually read it. Also light-colored areas in that picture form a circular pattern around the middle of the picture, which makes it easy for the eye to keep moving. Circles are easy for the eye to follow.
The other shot without the anchoring (full left side shot of knife) is one of the two shots I consider weakest of the set IMHO. That shot illustrates the difficulty of judging the size of the knife due to lack of auxilliary referential elements in the frame with the knife. The floating that the shot could have incurred is pretty much non-existent because you spanned the entire frame by bringing the tip & butt of the knife very very close to the corners of the frame.
The other shot I had technical difficulty with was the shot of the knife held in hand. The two downsides I saw in that shot were:
1. The lighting of the frame cast both the background and the tip of the knife in deep enough shadows that the tip disappears completely into the darkness of the background. This visual loss of some part of the main subject is also a pretty common phenomenon from what I've seen. This is particularly true when there is an insufficienct number of light sources. Also, hand-holding the knife steady in the frame while simultaneously shooting the shot I have found difficult and the results usually less than optimal. Maybe we need to have someone start up a Knife Models Agency to contract in people with aesthetically pleasing hands to hold knives for blade photographers.
2. Skin color on the hand seems to have a color shift toward red. If that is the actual color of your hand, my judgement of the color shift is amiss. The lighting in that shot looks almost as if there were light sources of two different color temps. Or maybe that the color of the light was incorrectly compensated by the camera's CCD (assuming a digi-cam). Were there overhead flourescent lights or an incandescent light influencing the shot maybe?
The thing I liked about the pic of the santuko in hand was that the scale of the knife was instantly established. Even given the difference that can exist in adult hand sizes, seeing the knife in hand was easily the most intuitively educational of the pics.
On the shot you included at the top of this thread, my inclination would be to eliminate the out-of-focus blade from the frame. To see what I mean, just place a sheet of paper (or other obstructing straight-edge) just left of where the handle ends in the picture and "chop off" the blade. To me the real focus of this shot was the ball-shaped swell at the butt of the handle. Having so much out-of-focus data at the upper left corner needlessly draws the eye away from that swell. Notice that the grain pattern in the swell makes repeating partial circles to help lock the eye onto that swell. Likewise, if the eye tries following the tang-line further up the handle the woodgrain lines coming down from the palm swelling recirculate the eye back to the butt swell.
Well, that's my off-the-cuff $0.02 worth.
(edited for spelling and sorting out my left from my right
)
....2 flourescents on the side, 1 incandescent in the back and flourescants providing infill above (ceiling mounted).