Thread: Photographing Razors

I've read all the stuff in the wiki, and I'm still photographically challenged when it comes to razors.

I put together a little razor "studio" tonight, with better results than I had been getting, but still not quite what I'm looking for.

So, I thought I'd start a thread about my experiences and how my "studio" is set up and get some feedback from some of the experts.

Mods: I wasn't sure where to put this thread. Feel free to move it to a more appropriate area if needed.

I started out with a simple lightbox setup like the one shown in the wiki, only slightly different. With my three light setup I left the left light uncovered, and covered the right one with a white sheet to reduce the intensity. This gives better shadows than two lights of equal intensity.

Beyond that I've been playing with various lighting angles, positioning the razor different ways in relation to the camera, draping sheets to get whiter reflections on the blades, and anything else I could think of.
I still was not happy with the photos.

Tonight I had an idea, and made a completely new setup. The pictures are more interesting, but still don't do a good job of showing off the blade. I wanted less depth of field, so I opened up the aperture of the lens to f 1.7. It looked good on the camera. Looking at the fullsize picture on the computer, I think that's too open.

I have a wide range of glass, and a DSLR, so any photo buffs that have any advice, I should be able to cover whatever would be needed with the camera. I have a feeling though that the camera is a small part of the equation.

I have trouble with black areas on the blades. The wiki says to orient the blade away from the camera to reduce this, but I still have problems. How do you guys get those nice shiny looking blades to turn out in your pictures?

Here are a couple of pics I took tonight, and a picture of the setup I used.
I put the razor on a piece of glass which is suspended on a box with the bottom and back of it cut out. This gave me a nice reflection, and I was able to bottom light the blade with a low intensity light under the glass.

I have some fake flowers stuck into styrofoam as a background. I wanted the background pretty blurry so went with the widest aperture I had available. In retrospect, I think I could use less aperture and just move the flowers back a bit to get the depth of field effect that I'm looking for.

Any advice would be much appreciated!