Home Forums Gear Knives and Blades here's a few I've been working on

Coral I actually dove for in the Cayman.

All 3 are really fantastic looking Dan, the coral is amazing and the middle one is eye popping candy, awesome man!

Thanks, I'm still working on a good pic of the coral that shows the detail. Can't get the lighting right

Top notch Dan

That coral looks fantastic IMO

Tried to brighten them up a little and mess with the shadows and contrast too.

Beautiful. Are they for sale?

I'm using a DSLR camera and I have lightroom and photoshop. I think the problem is lighting and glare

Try taking a step to your left or right so you are at a slight angle to the blade/knife. That should help some with any bounce back reflections to the lens. Blade steel is tough to capture sometimes.

I have a lightbox/diffuser I use to reduce glare but the camera just don't capture what my eye sees. I get it all set up and take 50 pics with slight variations and I might get one or two good ones.

I hear you. There is a guy named John Ferguson(sp) that takes some great pics of knives over on BF and he said it's all about lighting and little to do with the camera, so long as it's half way decent.

Gorgeous set of blades, Dan! The coral is a very cool material to work with the knife 2 really pops, as was mentioned. They'll sell quickly!

Eric

Excellent work! What type of file was used?

nicholson, all were annealed, worked and heat treated.

a little EDC to go with the Coral Hunter

It's a beauty!!

seems coral shares the same problem as pearl when it comes to home photos--great looking stuff however. cranky72

yes it does share the reflection problems. When you get the detail in the coral, everything else is way too dark.

One thing that you have to remember is that a polished blade will act like a mirror, and will reflect what "it sees".

What I would try would be to bring directional light in from over and behind the knive, and have a WHITE card in front of the blade to reflect the light back into the blade. The white card will help to lighten up the blade itself. The light coming over the top from the back will give you some highlights on top of the blade, and the reflected light will be even over the white card and thus even when bouncing back. If you need to, you can tone down the light coming from the rear with a piece of plastic or shower curtain or something like that.

Just make sure that the blade doesn't reflect anything other than the white card, or you could even use piece of silver card or very light gray card if you wanted to.

thanks, my camera has a 8x10 white diffuser around the lens. I held a white 18x18 diffuser and moved it till the glare went away. At least I thought it did