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Darcy and Ted do amazing work on blades and good work on fittings. Richard George does amazing work on fittings. 

Other people do reasonable work but are not at the same level. 

 

There are hozon level photographers, tokubetsu level photographers, juyo level and very few tokuju level. Then there is the great mass of never submitted, failed shinsa, and junk photographers who may take great shots of people, landscapes, pets and plants but not nihonto nor kodogu. I, unfortunately, fit into the last category or perhaps on a good day hozon level.

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Dear friends,

 

I really don`t like the term "best photographer". Japanese swords is education. And not competition.Especally here on the NMB.

 

If there was any, then the result was settled a long time ago. And the all-time-winner was - is- and will always be Okisato Fujishiro.

No doubt about it.

 

Okay, there are a few men who try to stand on the shoulder of a giant. But that´s it. All you have to ask yourself is: Can I do the same?

Or even better? Then welcome to club!

 

Just my 2 ct.

 

 

Uwe Grabowski

 

 

Btw: I really like Darcy´s photos.

post-699-0-31127800-1514972150_thumb.jpg

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Actually, I think Uwe is too modest. His composite photos of blades and tosogu are incredible. They take hours and days to compose but show intricate detail of the items without obfuscation though disparate lighting or variation due to angles. As such, I find them a great source of minute detail.

 

Darcy’s / Ted’s photos use a different technique (not so much overlays and superimposition etc but careful work with multiple, perhaps diffused light sources and clever angular positioning) so that very subtle details such as utsuri are captured.

 

Together with RKG they stand head and shoulders above the rest, who are clearly very skilled in photographing.

 

We read time and again on this board that we do not do political correctness here on the NMB, that we do not pull punches and are not for the faint hearted. So, it is time to clarify who we think are the best (at least among living professionals).

 

With all due respect to Fujishiro sensei, I think Uwe’s and Darcy’s photos show greater detail since techniques and technology have moved on since his time.

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Hi,

 

I've been crazy busy with year-end stuff and just looked at this thread.  I'm glad that some of you guys like my work :thanks:.

 

I can do OK shooting swords, though I think Darcy is more skilled at it/has a LOT more experience doing them - and they're actually a little difficult for me to do at the moment (my studio space is smaller than it used to be so I have to tear down everything/move out a bunch of stuff out, and...).  In addition, I've never been happy with my "glowing nie" images, and might well set up the sword rig again (after I get through the next batch of tsuba I have inbound) to see if I can figure out how some of the overall ones you see coming out of Japan these days are done.

 

Mariusz asked about some images....  I ended up pulling down a lot of sword images after I had some trouble with people er, using my stuff commercially w/o permission + actually most of my sword images were done for other people and I don't have the right to show them.  That said, here are a few I have up.  Note that one or two of them are over-sharpened because I had prepped them for use in for the videos I was doing...

 

First up, some "one shot" images:

 

http://www.rkgphotos.com/articles/ktk_one_shot_examples.jpg

 

and a couple of high rez ones (large file alert) - again, a bit over-sharpened because of their usage - and actually these are kind of too detailed - I'd probably reduce the size some for most applications:

 

http://www.rkgphotos.com/work_samples/yasuaki_front.jpg

 

http://www.rkgphotos.com/work_samples/ko_uda_comparison.jpg

 

I post a lot of tosogu images to Rich Turner's old kodogu no sekai facebook page:

 

https://www.facebook.com/Kod%C3%B4gu-no-Sekai-%E5%B0%8F%E9%81%93%E5%85%B7%E3%81%AE%E4%B8%96%E7%95%8C-266005023454853/

 

And I still make these when I can find some RF music/have time to record some descriptions:

 

https://www.youtube.com/user/rkgatteleport/videos?view=0&sort=dd&view_as=subscriber&shelf_id=0

 

Best,

rkg

(Richard George)

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Gee, I am surprised, yet honored to even be mentioned in this list.   At best, I would rate my own photos as, ok.

 

My mediocre attempts pale in comparison to the works of Darcy/Ted or Richards.

 

Thought I read where Ted is doing most of Darcy's photos these days, if true, I would definitely give him credit due, as well.

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Wah,

 

On the video...

 

I've experimented with that a bit, fwiw, and on top of the usual problems (rumble in whatever you are using to move the camera and/or sword, etc), there is a HUGE problem with losing fine details when moving using mpeg4 (H.264) compression during recording and also with most codecs when decoding - maybe the new mpeg-H compression will be better, but...

 

The first problem was why I gave up on trying to fly a camera over a sword while recording video and went to just "walking" through a large image.  You can actually see the second (codec) issue on -any- of the videos I've put up of runs along a sword - observe the detail visible when the video is running, and then pause it - you'll see a visible increase in the perceived detail in the stopped image (be sure to set the youtube options to hd 1080 as they look like a miserable mess at the low rez that youtube usually defaults to).  Its also why I move items in those videos REALLY SLOWLY....

 

And actually, I do have up video file so you can take the youtube compression issues out - here's a test file I did, where I only stepped through the image slowly rather than REALLY SLOWLY, and the problem is pretty obvious....

 

http://www.rkgphotos.com/facebook_stuff/osoraku_test.mp4

 

That said, I think maybe a Red/some other high end video gear might have a mode where it doesn't try and compress the captured images and lets you handle it in post to deal with this compression when recording issue, but I'm not sure as I don't normally do video stuff - I'm guessing you'll still have the rumble/vibration/motion blur issues to deal with then (diatribe on each problem and how maybe you could fix it deleted).

 

I'd guess you could take a stop action approach, but you'll need a decent motion control system for whichever element you decide to move (though you might have to do some kind of frame to frame alignment given the crazy high detail/contrast, but what do I know...).

 

Maybe somebody out there has some expensive video toys/motion system to play with?? :-)

 

 

Best,

rkg

(Richard George)

 

EDIT: I fixed a few terms (I hate this CRS stuff)/obvious typos...

 

I think high end cinema cameras have really caught up with photography in some cases surpassing it in certain situation in the last few years. One day we may be able to video nihonto like the way we see it in real life.

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George,

The choppy effect during pan can be caused by low shutter angle and the smearing of details can be cause by high shutter angle. There is also the rule of 7, that is the speed of the pan not less than 7 seconds over a given frame.

What camera are you using?

Youtube compression are pretty bad but their 4k is better.

What I have in mind for videoing nihonto is from a more naturalistic view of the blade as appose to what we see in standard nihonto photography, such as viewing at an angle.

 

Cheers

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Wah,

 

And I thought still photo guys had an esoteric vocabulary - actually had to look that one up (not a video guy, remember? :-) ). 

 

for my actual video testing I was using a Canon 5d MKII, which seemed to produce pretty reasonable 1080 in most other applications with the right settings - I'd run the shutter speed up to where there shouldn't have been noticeable but the really high frequency details just kind of vanished when in motion - Like I said, you could probably do better if you had a camera that could capture the data w/o mpeg compression applied, but I'm not sure what outside of a Red can do that...

(but again, what do I know - hopefully some of the video gurus on the list will get motivated and do a test or three...).

 

the "videos" of swords I post are generated with software panning through a still image so there is no shutter angle. Your rule of thumb is interesting - let's see - on a 20000 pixel wide image... 

 

I've been meaning to experiment with what you're describing for a while  (off axis "beauty runs",etc) - probably not too hard if you aren't looking for much detail (say just showing off the "glowing nie" under a light), but it you want super high detail....  more interesting...

 

rkg

(Richard George)

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