Top 9 Keys to Great Knife Photos

Travis Fry

Well-Known Member
My wife Cara is an important part of my knife business, and she wrote this tutorial to help others that may not have her mad skills:

Knife Photo Top Nine

You’ve spent hours perfecting your latest knife, hand polishing the blade until every scratch is gone, fitting all of the joints and pins together seamlessly, and applying layers of superglue to get that perfectly honed finish. It’s finished. It’s beautiful, but people won’t know just how beautiful it is unless you get an equally beautiful picture. Following are a few tips to help you get better results:

Equipment
To get the kind of shots I’m satisfied with I use a Canon DSLR camera, tripod, Adobe Photoshop CS4, and Adobe Lightroom 2.0 to manage my workflow. However if you don’t already have a Digital SLR Camera or know how to use Photoshop, I don’t recommend going out and purchasing them. Save your money and buy the KMG grinder or heat treat oven you’ve been drooling over, but do invest in a decent point and shoot camera other than the one on your phone. Unless you plan on printing poster sized images of your knives, then something around 5 or 6 megapixels should do the trick. I have a preference for Canon but there are other good ones out there. Adobe offers a consumer level program called Adobe Photoshop Elements. If you want to make image adjustments like increasing sharpness, lighting adjustments, optimize images for web viewing, or do a composition of several images, then this is the program for that. Lastly, think about getting a tripod.

Clarity
You can get the best shots in the best light if you don’t have to worry about cameral shake and this is why I recommend getting a tripod. Unless you’re zooming in on details, try to make sure the entire knife is in focus.

Light
Two words. Dawn and dusk. I don’t do dawn, so for me dusk it is. These are the best times to get that perfectly diffused light bouncing across the blade. If you don’t have a tripod then you’ll want to take pictures about and hour after sunup or an hour before sundown because you won’t be able to hold your camera still enough to get those crisp shots of knife details. Just don’t take pictures outside in the harsh sun at midday. Partly cloudy or in the shade are decent substitutes but the light is still best at dawn and dusk. Dawn and dusk.

If you are one of the mildly insane folks who happens to live north of Oklahoma and you don’t have anything but snow for a background (which could work if you expose the snow correctly) then find a window without direct sunlight, put a table next to that window, bring in your props and knife, and shoot your pictures on a tripod. Just make sure you have it cleared off and put back into place by dinner time so no one gets upset. There’s nothing that wives hate more than “knife crap” all over the table at dinner time. Also, dirty windows diffuse light better.

Unless you’ve got expensive lighting equipment that simulates natural light, use natural light. Typical household lights make your picture, and thus your knife, look yellow, so avoid using this kind of light.

Perspective
Start off with the classic knife profile picture, and make sure you get the whole knife in the shot and that everything is in focus. Get that out of the way, you’ll need that shot. Now get creative. You’ve looked at the knife from every angle, so why shouldn’t the rest of us get to see those angles. Zoom in tight on the spine or filework, blurring out the top and bottom parts of the frame. Take a closeup of that mosaic pin or red liner material. Try a shot down the tip of the knife. Stand on a chair and shoot down. Stick the knife in the side of a tree, lay on your back, blur the clouds in the background and take a close-up of just the handle. Show us the knife from angles we don’t usually see it from.

Creating Visual Interest
There might be a bit of debate on this point, but I suggest using natural props to create visual interest in your photos. Do you have a bed of rocks, an interesting tree stump, an anvil, or some old barn wood? Take pictures of your knife against various backgrounds to see what works. Be sure to create visual contrast with your knife. Don’t set a black handle against a dark grey piece of barn wood. Use natural elements that will help your knife stand out in the picture. Try layering textures. Get some leaves and twigs and set them on rock with moss growing on it and then put your knife on top of it and shoot from various angles. Be sure that the props you use don’t cast shadows on or cover up parts of the knife. If it’s too cold outside to push the shutter button, bring some of nature inside, set it on that table next to the window, and take your pictures there. Then clean up. See above about wives and scattered “knife crap.”

To Light Box or Not To Light Box
Lots of folks here use light boxes. There are situations where a light box is the best way to go, like if you are trying to make your hamon pop. Can I say make your hamon pop? I personally think natural light in natural settings creates more visual interest, though there are some knives that just look better against a plain background. Detailed engraving is a good example. The best thing about natural light is that it is free.

Get Closer
This is pretty self explanatory. Zoom in on the details. Make sure that the detail you’re zooming in on is in focus.

Be True to Your Knife (and your customer)
If you take my advice and invest in some basic photo editing software, then only make adjustments that don’t alter color. If you move that color slider over so that your pink handle turns blue, you could have a really irritated customer on your hands, unless deep down they really wanted pink and just haven’t come out of the closet yet. The point of good photography and of editing software is to make your knives look as great as they really are. If you edit stuff to make them look better than reality, that’s lying. See Revelation 21:8.

I hope this helps. If you start getting better pictures, it’s likely that those non-knife experts such as myself will think you are actually making better knives, when in reality people can just see your already great knives better. You can then chuckle knowingly to yourself and send me a portion of the profit increase that came from taking better pictures. Just kidding. Sort of.

Cara

Cara Fry Creative
www.carafry.com
 
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Thank you for posting this I will try some of those things out, and I do know the diner table rule....... Thank You
 
Great tutorial and nice sense of Humor too !

That Hamon Poppin comment had me rolling, LOL !

I think we've all learned the "crap on the table rule" from the school of hard knocks

Thanks for the Tutorial- Josh
 
Great tutorial, a lot of good advice, and a sense of humor too. I bet Cara keeps you on your toes,Travis. Thanks for the tutorial Travis and Cara.

Larry
 
Thanks for the great tutorial. I would only add that I think that a tripod is secondary in importance only to the camera for taking great photographs. They aren't expensive and eliminate many problems. In short, a tripod is a "must have" for knife photography.

Second, a lot of people have never heard of the photo editing software called "the GIMP". It is open source, free and will do just about everything Photoshop will do. For photo editing, it can't be beat. There are plenty of tutorials on the internet demonstrating how to use the software. You can get it here:

http://www.gimp.org/
.
Even though it is free, it is very powerful and feature packed. For those of us who can't afford Photoshop, the GIMP is an excellent alternative. In fact, a lot of people prefer GIMP over Photoshop, cost not being a factor, believe it or not.

So, get a tripod and the GIMP and you are all set to rock the knife world!
 
Thank you very much for a great tutorial, Cara. I am lousy at photo-shooting so these tips will help a lot.
 
I took a look at the open source GIMP software and it does look like it would be a good free option for photo editing. Though not as a powerful as Photoshop, I doubt that the average home user would be able to tell the difference. Excellent suggestion wncranger.
 
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