Thread: Photo pointers (sorry, no real razor content)

Great post! Thanks for doing it.

REMARKABLY informative and detailed post. Thanks!

Excellent work. That was a good read and great advice.

bj

I haven't had the time to read through it all yet, but I can tell there's lots of info there and so far it all sounds very helpful. Many thanks for the contribution. Hopefully soon people will actually be able to see the progress I've made on a restoration instead of seeing two gray blobs.

So this morning I noticed the light in my East-facing (but diffused) window was nice and bright, so I thought I would pull out my EDC pocketknife, which is very dirty and beat-up now...and give it a quick couple of pics with the technique I outlined here. I didn't bother doing much prep work (didn't want to overbrew my tea) and just did a couple quickies, so this should show what one can do with very very minimal prep and 20 seconds of levels/contrast correction in Photoshop. Now I have my tea and would like to share with those of you who enjoy aimless verbosity.

First I decided to take a picture of the knife fully open in front of my window:

Note from this angle, you can see how the light plays on the surfaces (remember the advantage of oblique angles?), and the blade is roughly the same shade as the handle material, but when I moved directly above to get a photo, I got this:


Now this isn't a terrible picture, but notice how much darker the blade looks than the handle scales? In fact, it was so much darker that I had to change levels in Photoshop (my camera has very strong contrast, so I had to pull the middle slider [midtones] in the levels window down). Why? Reflection angles--the handle scales in this orientation are reflecting much more of the window light into the camera. How could we change that? we could rotate the blade to a direction where it will reflect more of the incoming sunlight...



Due to the low angle of light, you can easily see a shadow on the far side. The piece of paper was able to weaken it slightly, but if you want to really take it down, a mirror or smooth sheet of aluminum foil would reflect more light. A much larger piece of white paper would also work well if leaned forward a bit to bounce the light down more...but this is what was in front of me, so it's what I used. How did this picture turn out?



See how much more light the blade is getting now? Again, a bit of levels tweaking in PS and I actually used the "dodge" tool to lighten up the darkening of the upper-left corner, but that's not really necessary...just a habit I have.

Just for fun I decided to take that piece of paper away and shoot on the black surface (a computer case cover, if you wanted to know)...



Notice the paper is close and sort of leaning over the knife? Again, a mirror or metallic surface would reflect more light and better control the shadows, as would a fill light if one were so inclined...but is it necessary to go to a lot of extra trouble? I guess it's up to the individual to decide. I would not use photos like these in a photography portfolio, but for eBay or general show and tell, they're not too shabby, and they're pretty quick and easy!



And on a final note: If you're going to take pictures of a knife or razor or anything, do what I didn't do: clean it first!

Robert - thank you for your thoughts and efforts in the post. I enjoyed the 'learning'.

Incredible. Thanks so much! I can't wait to see what other tips you (and others) come up with.

I need to bookmark this thread, this is great!

Fancy knife too...

Thanks so much! Opened a new world to me!

Slawman