How to scan Nihonto blades

[Jean]

Hi All,

 

Everybody knows how difficult it is to photograph swords (even with Darcy's article help). Moses Becerra who gets excellent shots of his blades was kind enough to send me a photography of his installation.

 

Conclusion : To make good pictures of blades, the first requirement is to have enough place.

 

I know that several people in NMB scan their blades to get good pictures.

 

For a kogatana, it is not much of an issue (I presume, nevertheless, I am going to verify)

 

 

Is there any volunteer among the member to explain clearly and simply how to scan longer blades?

[QuangD]

Jean,

 

There are several elements that requires to take a better picture.

 

1) SLR camera (Nikon and Canon would do) with Macro lense

2) Tripod

3) Softbox light with diffuser. You probably 250 WATT.

Unless you already have three points lights.

[Rich T]

writing something on this, it might take me a few days so be patient please.

 

This will be a very busy week for me

 

Rich

[Nicolas Rudaz]

Is there any volunteer among the member to explain clearly and simply how to scan longer blades?

 

I recently found an IEEE article that might answer your questions:

 

Technology for Digitalizing Pictorial Data of Japanese Swords

Akira Ide et al.

Proceedings of the 38th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2005

 

It can be downloaded as a PDF from:

http://csdl2.computer.org/comp/proceedings/hicss/2005/2268/04/22680102c.pdf

 

Nicolas

[Stephen]

A outstanding reference, a must save to file for any Nihontophile

[Brian]

Brilliant find Nicolas, thanks for pointing it out.

I had never seen that one before. It is an in-depth examination of scanning Nihonto.

Best to save it in case it ever disappears.

 

Brian

[Jean]

Outstanding!!!!

 

Many thanks from all Nihonto owners

[Nicolas Rudaz]

Jean, Brian, Stephen, thank you for your kind words.

I didn't yet have the time to try the techniques described in the article,

but I intend to do so as soon as possible. I suppose that some image

processing software (e.g. Photoshop) is needed in addition to a scanner,

but otherwise the setup is very straightforward.

 

Nicolas

[Stever]

Wow! Thanks, Nicholas! I'm going to have to try those techniques, I've been having a hell of a time getting even reasonable photos. Gotta love the IEEE, never ceases to amaze me the range of subjects they touch on. But considering that (apparently) engineers are fairly prevalent amongst nihonto collectors, I'm not surprised!

 

cheers

[Darcy]

This is definitely the best bang-for-the-buck approach for the hobby sword collector to image his items.

 

This approach takes probably 25% of the time that is involved in what I do, and can be done at less than 5% of the equipment expense, and requires about 1% of the skill.

 

Add that up and it is a pretty efficient way to go about things.

[Henry Stewart]

I can appreciate all that has been said but does anyone know of a blow by blow step procedure of how to send a scanned object (blade or paper)

by say e-mail for instance.

I would be very much obliged for an understandable explanation in common language

HenryStewart1

[Bond]

Hello Gents!

I found this old thread with above mentioned article about scanning nihonto - it is very useful!

 

And I thought to share my learnings, it might be interesting for the ones who would be starting, so they could avoid my mistakes :-)

- First it would be much more convenient and faster to scan on a bigger than A4 scanner.

- Second, it is better to have a lid that can either be removed or that opens by the long side of the scanner, like the one in the article.

- Then having a firm, long and importantly not moving guide(s), alongside which you will be pushing the blade, will save you a good deal of time when you will be stitching images together later.

- And also keeping the same scanned area & exposure will serve exactly the same purpose. Avoid changing it - make one preview, set area that will work for all parts of the blade and set the settings. Then just keep scanning and pushing the blade alongside your guide.

- Try different scanning directions to find which one works best. Results will be different depending from which direction scanning head moves to the subject. For example I had mune gone in dark on the one side of the blade until I turned the blade upside down.

 

And if you would like to see the results of my new experiment, its here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2bq5yys8x1hzjy4/pano.jpg

As Dropbox'es preview eats all the details - click "Download" in the right top corner to see the actual file, its small just 350kb.

 

Cheers!

[Peter Bleed]

Let me add my thanks for the presentation of this article. My University has a Center for Digital Research in the Humanities with some very nice, - big - scanners. I look forward to exploring this technique!

Peter