when buying fittings by pics...

raiden · May 26, 2013

Be aware of the differences of the pics offered. Also according to Mike Han (NVIDEA Corp) he told me an important fact - most people do not have their monitors calibrated properly including those that are doing the pics! Here is a pic of a Nobuiye that I just bought, right side is the pic they sent me, left is mine.

Pete Klein · May 26, 2013

I'll take it! LOL!!! Now -- how do I afford it???

Just kidding but a GREAT example. I'd love to see that one in hand, that's for certain. I believe it has the sumari type mei under the futoji mei group.

paulb · May 26, 2013

Hi Mike,

Having worked in both colour and light measurement for more years than I care to remember you hit a nerve when talking about assessing colour on monitors. I dont think it is a case of some monitors not being calibrated I think it is virtually all monitors (unless they are purchased for several thousand dollars) are not calibrated, and certainly not regularly checked for calibration. So I get very nervous when people start making assessment about colour in steel or of a nakago when looking at in image on a screen

Having said all that the main problem in the images you have posted (I suggest) is not to do with screen calibration it is the background. A basic rule in comparing colour is always have the same background, preferably a neutral grey. In your example you have the absolute extreme of black against white. As a result the tsuba looks pale against the black and dark against the white.

I have used similar examples when teaching colour courses to show how dramatic the background effect can be.

sorry to go off at a tangent but as I said this is a recurring issue in colour assessment and appraisal and one to be aware of

Best Regards

Paul

Brian · May 26, 2013

Ok, now that one rings all the bells (or is that ticks all the boxes?)

I won't overuse the drool smileys here, but........

And excellent points about monitors and colour calibration. I know this was discussed before, but it bears repeating. Mike has shown perfectly how important pics are, like day and night. Someone attempting to get top dollar with the right hand image....

Pete...c'mon, you know you want it... :lol:

Brian

Pete Klein · May 26, 2013

OK -- OK -- WHY NOT JUST DRIVE A STAKE THROUGH MY HEART AND BE DONE WITH IT ALREADY???

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

rkg · May 26, 2013

Mike,

Oh yeah... I run into these issues all the time... Its really quite difficult to have to have conversations with people about the color of something in their images that I shoot for them when I'm 99.9999% sure they've never calibrated their monitor (or worse yet have tweaked the monitor's color temperature/gamma so it looks good to them)/have any clue about color management, though this has gotten better in the last couple of years with most of the world having converted to LCD displays (they're usually closer to correct out of the box and people don't seem to tweak them as much). But even with everything correctly calibrated, its really only relevant to talk about if everybody is looking at the object under exactly the same lighting conditions - good thing the brain makes all these crazy white point/color corrections at every image its presented... There are also potential issues withexposure - if you let the camera decide the exposure its often "wrong" (IMO) - I finally started imaging all pieces with a piece of gray card visible in the images so I could set the exposure.

BTW, have you calibrated your scanner lately? :-)

If anybody cares about all this color management stuff out there they could start down the rabbit hole by picking up a copy of Real World Color Management By frasier, Murphy, and Bunting.

Between the two pictures you have posted, it seems at first glance the bigger issue is the lighting - theirs is terrible, and yours is a scan, which gets the idea across but IMO still could be better (but that's just me - some people really like how scans look, so YMMV)

Here's an example. the first is a scan done by the seller - I've seen worse. you can tell they're shibuichi with gold highlights, interesting looking piece, etc.

Then I ended up reshooting it - I think you see more of what you see when you look at them in hand, the colors are closer (though again, since few looking at these have calibrated monitors what does that really mean) you get a better feeling of the depth of the piece, etc:

BTW, I bet the Nobuiye you have posted is Really Cool in hand but you sure couldn't tell that from the original image you got from the seller - I guess this is just the photographer's style, or perhaps they figured the papers would sell the piece or something? :-/

I never have figured out why people use crap images for expensive items though I have seen some interesting traffic on why realtors don't - if you skip the 'how to' stuff and go to the bottom of the following thread you might find the observations interesting:

http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1198619

Best,

rkg

(Richard George)

Brian · May 26, 2013

Things as simple as the backgrund colour....

I used to list some militaria on eBay (Parker Hale sights) and used to find that the same item will fetch up to 50% more with a classy blue or red background than the same items on a plain white background.

Psychology...

Brian

Soshin · May 26, 2013

Hi Everyone,

From this thread I have only came to the following conclusion. Mike Y. please have Richard G. take photographs of your Nobuie tsuba and post them on NMB. That would be a wonderful sight to see even with our poorly calibrated display screens. :lol:

raiden · May 27, 2013

I'm glad everyone could think a bit about these things, I feel it is important when buying on the web. Of course that is why we and others offer inspection periods as well. Good hunting! I myself am attending a Macro class this weekend - I know i suck as a photographer - RKG come live in LA!

rkg · May 27, 2013

Mike,

Nah, you should move north :-)

rkg

rkg · May 28, 2013

As its usually a lot of work to get the lighting so you can "see everything" in one shot, another methodology to consider using is a VR image set or even a short video of a piece being moved

relative to a light source. Even with a mediocre/slapped together lighting setup it usually lets you see everything (as long as you get the exposure correct anyway). I've posted these before, but here's a couple of quick examples (all of these you can move around by doing the "click and grab" thing:

http://www.rkgphotos.com/sale_stuff/kyo ... front.html

http://www.rkgphotos.com/sale_stuff/aka ... front.html

http://www.rkgphotos.com/sale_stuff/aka ... _back.html

Spherical ones (can take a while to load):

http://www.rkgphotos.com/recent_stuff/t ... abuto.html

(takes a loong time to load and is flash based):

http://www.rkgphotos.com/recent_stuff/t ... small.html

Some of these take a lot of bandwidth, but I think the viewer gets a really good idea of what they'll look like in-hand...

Best,

rkg

(Richard George)

christianmalterre · May 28, 2013

Hmmmh! !

Yep!

Classic and beautifully centered on the each´s essential Rich.

Thank you for posting :D

Good eye

me here as an absolute lay in photographing still personally prefer sunshine...

i but feel confident once in future you may show me what to do better...

some of mine attached...

the top one for publication,the other one for personal correspondance in past e-mail traffic...

Christian

rkg · May 28, 2013

Christian,

I actually prefer shadowless shooting for pubs, and wrote up an article a looong time ago on how to do that, though my actual lighting is much more sophisticated now (and honestly its different for almost every piece - the secret sauce really is the lighting) here's my most recent update of that:

http://www.rkgphotos.com/articles/ktk_p ... t_2012.pdf

The sword pics and armor pics could be better - I've spent some time working on sword lighting while testing a new camera and do better now:

http://www.rkgphotos.com/recent_stuff/t ... f_size.jpg

I'm still working on the setup for getting those oblique shots on a sword to show off the hamon/activities to put together a flyby VR image set, but that's even more OT than the sword picture...

On lighting, yeah, sunlight seems to be the "standard", but you also have to remember that part of the design assumptions for a lot of these pieces was that in addition to being viewed outdoors, they were meant to be appreciated indoors as well, which was really quite dark by our standards (Tanizaki's essay "in praise of darkness" laments this), and pieces will often have very different character (gold nunome glows, the colors are different, you see different highlights, that gold flake lacquer that looks outlandish under "normal" light looks very cool, etc) when studied under those conditions. There's actually an article in the forthcoming KTK catalog on this topic, but here's an out take - some images of a tsuba shot at a Japanese garden in a traditional structure - the exposure is actually the same in all images. Notice the character differences between the pieces lit by the interior vs. the outside light:

Best,

rkg

(Richard George)

Soshin · May 29, 2013

Hi Richard G.,

Thanks for the updated requirements I will take a look and reread them. I had a older copies from 2007 up until 2011. These are the general guidelines I use for tsuba photographs on my website and to document my collection.

christianmalterre · May 29, 2013

Dear Rich

unquestionable myself never was aware in fact!-Funny not??

You do raise an intriguing topic here!

Phantastic

Thank you very much for heading me here!

Great we do have this forum here -i am very happy about,and one does continuously learn something new...!!!!!!!!!!

Christian

Brian · May 29, 2013

Thanks for sharing your knowledge Richard.

I have updated the link to this write-up in the articles section viewforum.php?f=17

Brian

christianmalterre · June 5, 2013

did experiment an bit more...Rich...

especially in regard of Tanizaki´s writing and Soetsu Yanagi´s words equally mentioned in the text...

Here´s an somehow "contra-experimental" essaye i actually did play with...LOL!

"new colours in live"

LOL!(not to ben taken too much seriously of course)

just for fun... :D

Christian

Henry Wilson · June 5, 2013

Nice tsuba Christian. The plate looks black, thin and granular, and reminds me of ko tosho and the cut out and motif makes me think kamakura bori. What is your take on it? Thanks for sharing.