well the main problem with photographing things like knives is that they have shiny surfaces. So... you either need to use soft natural light or reflected flash light.... not direct light from a flash! Otherwise you get blown out highlights... glaring white spots in the picture that are distracting.
When shooting your stuff outside... do it early in the morning or at sunset. Otherwise you get washed out colors and blown out hightlights from direct sun. If shooting midday, only do it on overcast days. I love cloudy days for shooting close ups. That is how you get truly saturated colors in your image. The problem with this is that you often need a tripod to be able to get sharp images in the lower light.
For shooting indoors, I'm making a 'soft box'... sort of a mini studio for shooting small things. Basically I'm taking a 3'x3' cardboard box and lining it with something white. I will probably just use white printer paper... but if you had some styrofoam that would work too. Then you wanna set a light bulb (incandescent! Not flourescent!) in an aluminum reflector (like this:
http://www.harborfreight.com/cpi/ctaf/displayitem.taf?Itemnumber=98486&xcamp=google&utm_source=googlebase&utm_medium=cpc&zmam=33951326&zmas=12&zmac=112&zmap=98486) and orient it below the box and pointed to the top of the box. The idea is that you want the light to reflect off the white lining of the box down to your knife which gives you nice, even, soft lighting. So on the bottom of the box you put some kind of background for your knife. Whatever your imagination tells you. One thing I've seen that will be really helpful is to use clay to orient the knife so that your blade bevels and other things show up the way you want it to. You can form the clay under the knife to achieve the angle that you want. Then you can just hand hold the camera and try different compositions until you get what you want. One thing to remember though is depth of field. The closer you get to your subject, you will lose depth of field... meaning that some things are in focus and some things are not. This can look really bad. So... if you have manual settings on your camera you want to make sure you are shooting with a small aperture i.e. F22 or F16. But this might be too much!
Anyway... let me know if this is interesting or confusing and I will try to clarify.
oh... one more important thing... learn how to turn your flash off if you are using a small automatic camera! Those cheap flashes kill photos.
Topic: a whittling knife (Read 700 times)
