Photographing Nihonto

[Leroy]

Hi all. I just got back to SJ after being away for 6 weeks. Anyways, those of you that use SLR's to photgraph your blades, what lenses do you recoomend? My first attempt I was using a 28-135mm and found this was not wide enough for a katana with my camera mounted on a tri-pod. I recently got a 17-70 and am looking forward to trying this lens out. To len you know, I'm using a Canon XTi. Thanks all.

 

-Leroy

[rkg]

Leroy,

 

The sigma 17-70 doesn't seem to be too bad a lens, as long as you aren't

shooting it at or near 17mm, which shouldn't be that much of a problem, as you probably should be shooting with it at ~35mm to minimize the barrel distortion.

 

As far as a recommendation goes, it kind of depends on what you are trying to capture. for closeups, I use either a 100mm macro or my Tamron 180mm macro (sharpest EF mount lens I've ever used), and actually for overalls I usually try and use a prime and shoot diagonally (50mm macro), though I've also had good luck doing this with a 17-40 f/4L as well. I'll also sometimes use a 24mm shift lens to get out of the picture

and have no distortion, though most people can get away with just shooting off axis a little to accomplish this.

 

Was your comment about tripod size because you are shooting down on the piece? if so, you may want to think about

improving that setup as well so you don't have to use your lens at its shortest focal length - the simplest solution is to get a bigger tripod and a Bogen right angle tripod arm so you can hang the camera out over the piece more easily. I usually end up using a sandbag on the ground to tie the other end to as a

counterbalance. If I recall correctly, the XTi doesn't have shutter lockup,

which is a bummer as it helps a LOT when you're trying to get high resolution photos (the mirror slapping up makes stuff jump all over the place - which is bad because you are going to be shooting stopped down

(which usually means slow shutter speed unless you're using studio flash or incredibly bright lights) to get enough depth of field). About the best you can do is get a matthews baby boa bag (or some sheet lead) and

wrap it around the head or arm on the tripod to damp vibrations and use the timer or remote control to trigger the camera. Or you can go to a studio flash setup for illumination to get the shutter speed back up, but this is usually quite a pain (seems like the modeling lights don't quite show what you're going to see + its a pain to get the exposure right - even with a flash meter it takes some testing...).

 

As an alternative, you can just use your existing tripod by using it closed as the boom and attach it to something that isn't going anywhere (ladders, sandbags, clamps, and rope can be your friend here).

 

Good Luck on your endeavor...

 

Best,

 

rkg

(Richard George)

http://www.rkgphotos.com

[Brian]

Richard,

 

Welcome to the forum..good to have you here (and what kept you? )

From your website, you are eminently qualified to give hints on photography..some stunning galleries you have there!

Gallery 20 has some beautiful Nihonto shots.

I look forward to any further input you have and to your continued participation.

I would love to have a short article for the archives/articles section on photographing Nihonto if you are ever so inclined

There was a good one out there in the past, but it is not freely available anymore for valid reasons by the author. Any tips are welcome.

I must haul out my old Canon 300D and see what it can do for my lousy skills. Just afraid that it will take away any excuses I had for my bad photos :D

 

Regards,

Brian

 

Btw - Richard has written one of the best articles aimed at newcommers to the world of Nihonto. It is hosted on Rich S's site here : http://home.earthlink.net/~steinrl/advice.htm

[w.y.chan]

Hi George,

 

Sounds like you are a camera buff. Your sword photos are very good indeed. I only have experience with taking photos of people using dSLR, I have the 300D, 350D and now the 400D but lens distortion I find can be handled better by having a zoom lens at around 100mm or better. Crop cameras like the XTi can still get away with 50mm due to the 1.6 x crop factor for zoom. Havent really taken any sword photos seriously except a few closeups to show the hamon and hada, what I did not expect was using these Canon crop cameras is that using F7.1 gives the best realistic look of the blade surface when compared to other F stops amongst 3 different lens I tried while shooting semi close-up.

Do you think using studio flash helps taking the kind of photos we see in books?

[Leroy]

Leroy,

 

The sigma 17-70 doesn't seem to be too bad a lens, as long as you aren't

shooting it at or near 17mm, which shouldn't be that much of a problem, as you probably should be shooting with it at ~35mm to minimize the barrel distortion.

 

As far as a recommendation goes, it kind of depends on what you are trying to capture. for closeups, I use either a 100mm macro or my Tamron 180mm macro (sharpest EF mount lens I've ever used), and actually for overalls I usually try and use a prime and shoot diagonally (50mm macro), though I've also had good luck doing this with a 17-40 f/4L as well. I'll also sometimes use a 24mm shift lens to get out of the picture

and have no distortion, though most people can get away with just shooting off axis a little to accomplish this.

 

Was your comment about tripod size because you are shooting down on the piece? if so, you may want to think about

improving that setup as well so you don't have to use your lens at its shortest focal length - the simplest solution is to get a bigger tripod and a Bogen right angle tripod arm so you can hang the camera out over the piece more easily. I usually end up using a sandbag on the ground to tie the other end to as a

counterbalance. If I recall correctly, the XTi doesn't have shutter lockup,

which is a bummer as it helps a LOT when you're trying to get high resolution photos (the mirror slapping up makes stuff jump all over the place - which is bad because you are going to be shooting stopped down

(which usually means slow shutter speed unless you're using studio flash or incredibly bright lights) to get enough depth of field). About the best you can do is get a matthews baby boa bag (or some sheet lead) and

wrap it around the head or arm on the tripod to damp vibrations and use the timer or remote control to trigger the camera. Or you can go to a studio flash setup for illumination to get the shutter speed back up, but this is usually quite a pain (seems like the modeling lights don't quite show what you're going to see + its a pain to get the exposure right - even with a flash meter it takes some testing...).

 

As an alternative, you can just use your existing tripod by using it closed as the boom and attach it to something that isn't going anywhere (ladders, sandbags, clamps, and rope can be your friend here).

 

Good Luck on your endeavor...

 

Best,

 

rkg

(Richard George)

http://www.rkgphotos.com

 

 

A lot of good advice, George, thank you. Sorry for the very late reply. As you can see from my webpage, I have taken a few shots of soem of my blades. I am looking to take more over head images. Like the ones of the tanto in your gallary 20. Great pics by the way. I have not had a chance to take over head shots with my sigma yet. I will do that when I get back tot he US (in Japan at the moment).

 

I have tried following the advice in the article Brian mentioned. It's very good. I just wasn't sure what type of leneses were good. ANymore advice, I'm all ears. Thanks again, and welcome!

 

-Leroy

[rkg]

Thanks for the comments - I've actually got better work to rotate

into my website, but don't have the time right now.

 

On the lens distortion - you can go to the following test site and

pretty much figure out where the lens distortion is minimized for

a particular zoom:

 

http://www.photozone.de/8Reviews/index.html

 

Thre really isn't a single focal length for all zoom lenses where they have minimum distortion.

 

On the apeture setting, maximum 'sharpness' depends on your sensor resolution vs. the resolving power of the lens vs. diffraction effects.

A lot of consumer lenses "peak out" in resolution around f/8, but again, it depends partially on what lens you're talking about , and partially on physics (you can't get around the rayleigh limit...). Again, you can check the above site or do your own resolution

tests (google koren lens test) to objectively see where your lens/camera

combination peaks out...

 

The good things about these 1.6x crop cameras is that 1) they use the

centers of lenses, where a lot of them are actually fairly good, and 2)

you get a lot more depth of field, so you're not having to try and shoot

stuff a f/16 to get it sharp top to bottom...

 

On lenses, When I want the "best" picture I can get, I usually use a prime of some kind - there are a couple of issues with zooms - first is the

distortion thing (there's only a small region where there's no distortion

(and sometimes they distort badly across their entire range), resolution

in general (these lenses are extremely complex, and you have issues with design and actually how they were assembled - its usually a good idea to test any zoom after buying it to see if there are any problems (the old

"brick wall" test is fairly quick)). The second is a little issue called

"transmissivity" that most manufacturers try and avoid talking about - a lot of these modern zoom lenses have so many elements that they actually lose an appreciable amount of light going through them, so you end up with a slower shutter speed for a given apeture for correct exposure.

 

Primes tend to be simpler designs (so they get correctly manufactured most of the time), are distortion corrected, let through more light, and

are (if its a good lens) capable of out-resolving your camera's sensor so everything looks sharp.

 

On the "picture book pictures" - these were mostly done with medium/large format cameras in the past - and honestly, getting a

overall sword picture that "looks like that" with anything less than

a 12 MP or so camera is dicey - you can figure the number of pixels - the

human eye can only resolve somewhere between 215 and 400 PPI depending on the contrast of the subject (which is why most cameras

tend to put their "native resolution" at 240PPI - looks sharp for "general"

photos). for example, taking a 20D's sensor size (3504x2336), going across the diagonal and dividing that by say 215PPI would only allow you

to get an object what, 19.5" or so at a high resolution - same calculation

with a 1DS MKII sensor gets you to 27.9"

 

Fortunately, you can probably get away with slightly less resolution for most stuff. Take 180PPI - at that range, the numbers would go to ~23" for the 20D and ~33.3" for the 1DsMKII. Empirically, I've seen work done with a Canon 5D that is comparable to "those pictures", so you can probably go lower, but this gives you some idea of the tradeoffs.

 

The second issue is that swords, particularily with the black backgrounds have incredibly high contrast, so you have issues with rendering them for print - You have to print at like 400DPI or more to make the aliasing "jaggies" small enough so they don't catch your eye. I'm still wrestling with whether this is a "real" problem or not (I'm thinking I can solving it by doing iterative resampling), but other people I've talked to are convinced it is, so...

 

On the studio flash, its a pain because of trying to get the exposure right and observing what actually will end up being photographed (things seem to look different between what you see with the modeling lights on and when the flash itself fires) - but gives you a Very Fast effective shutter speed, so

you don't have any of the issues with vibrations that you have when trying to use "hot lights" (which take a fairly long exposure, even with monster lights (a 1000W light in a big softbox isn't as bright as you'd think). I'm still using hot lights for this because I can see the "end product" in real time - speeds up things a lot, given how touchy lighting is on swords to make them look their best...

 

Sorry for the diatribe...

 

rkg

(Richard George)

[w.y.chan]

Hi Richard,

Very informative. Do you have examples of sword photos you taken?

 

I suppose when you said "hot light" you mean "continous light" or lighting use for filming? I had briefly experimented with sync studio flash over Xmas but not very satisfactory so chose continous light 240W halogen bulb. I use the EF-S 17-55 f2.8 IS and the EF-S 60mm f2.8 macro and EF 50mm f1.8. They all look pretty similar when shooting a blade upclose. It is no wonder Fujishiro refuse to let anyone know his sword photographic technique.

[rkg]

I've got a few ut there, mostly macro work though - I haven't done much overall work since I upgraded my cameras - got some good ones using a 6x7 medium format, but I've never had any of them drum scanned to

put online (again, it became obvious I couldn't shoot much more than a

tanto overall at high resolution with an 8MP camera). I'm going to upgrade to either a 1DSII or its replacement in the near future, but I'm going nuts

post processing tosogu photos for a book on fittings for the KTK right now and have like NO spare time to think about it...

 

hot light = continuous (usually tungsten) light - I now use photoflex starlites

with 1000W bulbs in soft boxes. - you can try remote controlled camera

flashes as well using your camera's ettl metering system - this seems to work

much better than studio lights for this (though you need a herd of flashes to do much good).

 

Gotta run,

 

rkg

[trygve]

Darcy Brockbanks wrote a very good article on how to take photos of nihonto. If you have seen his photos at http://www.nihonto.ca, you will understand that this article tells it all. This article is more like a book but is a must read for all that wants to take good photos. Its a pitty DB is not around this forum anymore - he had some very good articles.

 

The article used to be found at The nihonto knowledge Base. Maby some of the senior members has it on file in their harddrive.

 

sincerely

trygve

[Darcy]

I am still around just been extremely busy with family health issues.

 

Richard and I have been discussing sword photography off and on for a couple of years and worked out some of the techniques I use together. He takes very good sword photos and his advice is very useful in this area...

[Brian]

Darcy,

Good to see you on the forum again, and I wish everyone there good health.

There is some valuable info in this thread, and I will be adding some of it to the archives section shortly.

 

Regards,

Brian