Photographing Nihonto (my experience)

[Toki]

Hello everyone :D
As mentioned in my previous post, I had the pleasure to receive my first Nihonto last week. It´s been bringing me so much joy and motivation to learn more about those beautiful pieces of art.

Naturally, as a hobby photographer, I always wanted to try taking pictures of them and now that I got a blade of my own, I can finally try my luck. It is a whole new field of photography for me, one that I am, quite frankly, unprepared for. Usually I shoot Landscape and Nature, with the occasional plane spotting trip to nearby military air bases. Macro photography however is completly new to me and my lacking equipment (I don´t even own a tripod. Foolish, I know). 
Reading all the resources and past posts here on Nihonto Message Board, especially Darcy`s PDF file about this topic, really helped me getting started and giving me a rough idea what to do and what to avoid. While it´s not exactly the setup mentioned in that article, I tried to copy it with what I had.
I went with the following setup (will leave a picture below). 
For the enviroment I used the wooden box usually used for painting model planes with an airbrush. I hung up some dark cloth in it to have a proper background and placed a daylight LED-Panel on the Plexiglass roof of the box for the lighting. I used a secondary lamp for some diffusing background lighting and to set accents in the pictures. Since I do not own a tripod, the camera was fixed to a music stand using a cable tie. 

For the camera I used a Sony a6400 with the Tamron 17-70mm f2.8 lens. I chose it over the Sigma 30mm f1.4 for its lower minimum focus distance of 0.19m at wide angle of 17mm (~25mm if we take the 1.5x factor for APS-C into account) and 0.39m at maximum focal lenght. In terms of settings I chose a focal lenght of 25mm and apeture of F4.5 since I found that as a sweetspot where it is the sharpest in the past. I wanted to keep the ISO at 100, even though the a6400 has good noise control up until around 1600 ISO, as I worried it would interfere with the Hada and other details in the blade. Shutter was set at 1/15s since I was shooting on a stationary position anyways and not handheld.

Personally, I would say for the second try ever at this the pictures are quite okay. Compared to the pictures in the last post I find the current ones a big upgrade. 

I found a big spot without Hada which I suspect is core steel (marked in red, correct me if I am wrong) that I somehow overlooked when inspecting it at the shop. Also, some little rustspots, scratches, and a few nicks in the mune, but I was already aware of those as the seller mentioned them in the listing. Overall, I find the blade quite nice to look despite those things listed.

I will post a few of the better pictures below. All the pictures are cropped and compressed to JPG so I can do them all at once. If anyone wants the full sized ones, let me know. Also, any tips for better pictures are of course welcome!

Thank you for listening my Ted Talk

Have a nice day/night everyone 

[Mikaveli]

Try some incandescent light sources, as well as LED and fluorescent lights.

 

(Auto) Focus can be tough - but looks like you've handled that well.

[Toki]

Great Idea, thank you!
 

[Lewis B]

It's a noble cause Erik and one I approve of. Very few people take the time to optimise the photography of nihonto, which is a shame as there is so much beauty that is lost to the casual observer. I get as much pleasure from taking photographic images of my blades as I do studying their history. Darcy and Pablo are the two pioneers who really sparked my desire to improve my own skills. 

 

I'm by no means a photographer and had limited equipment when I started last year. My camera is an aging Fujifilm XT2 with the kit zoom lens. I quickly realised to capture all the fine detail a sword has to offer, a macro lens was essential. I bought a cheap, used Laowa 65mm F2.8 from Ebay Kleinanzeigen. The lens is manual only but I think the way manual focus works on the XT2 there is no problem getting pin sharp photos in combination with the Laowa. Next most important consideration were the light sources and I think it's true to say there is no universal light that will highlight every feature in the hada, hamon and boshi. After a few experiments the primary light sources I use now are an Ikea Jansjö LED lamp, which was recommended on a forum dedicated to macro photography. These are unfortunately discontinued but you can easily find them listed on Kleinanzeigen and I bought four for 5 euro each. To see the hataraki in the hamon, I discovered a high intensity halogen light with a dimmer to control output produced the best results (I think this is what Pablo Kuntz's photographer uses). Finally a tripod is critical when implementing longer exposures and I use the Fujifilm iPhone App to control the shutter release so there is zero risk of unintended movement.

 

Here are some images I took from my first session. These are all jpg's without post-processing. You'll find more in the Google Drive folder. Still room for improvement, not least wiping the blade to eliminate all the dust particles . 

 

Ikea Jansjö LED lamp/Macro lens/tripod

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hcfbKl8l-efqxqyAxZ4Oe_PdNVX_jwDN/view?usp=sharing

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1crDNe1w38OAxs56JgM0YfQpHB6nDpDWd/view?usp=sharing

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/15k7eGF_EwuC_oCAi-dd5qTee_p5E5PgY/view?usp=sharing

 

250W High Intensity halogen bulb/macro lens/tripod

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ri4luL4j5Lslik8-sYD63RvJ-mJj9jlX/view?usp=sharing

 

iPhone 12/natural diffuse daylight/handheld blade and phone

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ppwmEYqNJq_mI8zImLY5FQg2Vkbu6M-1/view?usp=sharing

 

Good luck 

 

 

[ROKUJURO]

Hi Erik,

some of your photos are really good!
Generally, making photos of swords isn't too difficult, but some practice can be helpful.

Meaningful images should be:
 

- well focused, not foggy or blurry

- made with a plain dark/black, non-reflective background for good contrast (not white or bright)

- made in a dark room, using spotlights

- made with light from the side (may not apply to HAMON photos)

- made directly from above (not at an angle)

- made with correct orientation (straight vertically tip-upwards, especially NAKAGO photos) 

- without HABAKI, showing the MACHI and NAKAGO JIRI

- made in high resolution to see details like BOSHI, HAMACHI, HAMON, HADA, NAKAGO JIRI etc.

- presented as cut-outs so very little background is showing

One main thing is to know what the important features of a blade are and how to capture and present them. 
 

It does not depend so much on expensive camera equipment or on special skills, but more on observing the results. You will find that only really good photos will contain enough information to help with the identification.
 
Kind regards,
 

Jean

[Lewis B]

4 hours ago, ROKUJURO said:

Generally, making photos of swords isn't too difficult

 

Judging by 90%+ posts we see here, I beg to differ. Even the dealers with decades of experience do a p!ss poor job of it.

[Toki]

Thank you @Lewis B for sharing those pictures. Those are some absolute beauties, even the Iphone shot is really cool. Shows that the photographer is more important than the equipment

 

I totally agree with you that a macro lens is needed for capturing the maximum amount of detail and I plan on getting one in the future as well. For now, the Tamron is near macro level enough until I find a cheap one on ebay. The smarter way for me is probably investing in a decent setup with better (and different) lighting and a proper tripod. Unfortunately we swapped all lamps to LED a few years back, so I will need to get a halogen lamp/ normal light bulbs.

I do have an old Sodium lamp though, so I might experiment with that. 

And lastly, for the next one I will for sure dust off everything around the blade first. I only realized when looking at the photos in Lightroom that there were particles here and there on the blade.

 

 

Also, thank you so much Jean for clearing that up. You are correct, taking pictures, while challenging for me, is actually not the main problem. As a beginner its hard to know what exactly I should look for and what to photograph exactly, so i mainly tried to replicate what I see here on the forums.

Unfortunately my current setup doesnt allow proper 90° top down shots, and certainly not in the correct orientation, but I will try and fix that in the future (along with lighting and background). 

Personally I found the kissaki area the hardest to shoot and did not manage to get decent lighting on it yet.

I will update once I managed to build a proper setup

 

Much thanks to you two again!

 

 

Best Regards 

Erik 

 

[ROKUJURO]

1 minute ago, Toki said:

......Personally I found the kissaki area the hardest to shoot.....

Not only for you Erik!

[atm]

I am always impressed with the good photos of nihonto that some people are able to take. I’ve tried playing around with it a bit, but it seems like the fancier I try to get, the worse the photo. So I’ve resorted to just using my iPhone. Dust, reflections, lighting—all so frustrating. Just when I think I have a decent photo, I notice something is off. And good luck capturing a boshi!

[ROKUJURO]

Adam,

some images are really good in my opinion. It is as you say: TRy different angles and lighting, use a dark background for good contrast, and find the perfect focus. Your results will guide you!

[Toki]

Those are some beautiful photos Adam. Especially the one of the Boshi. May I ask where you had the light come from for that one?

So far, my pictures of the Kissaki always have been either out of focus or with bad lighting, so it´s needless to say making out the Boshi is impossible. I´ll post two regardless, one with my phone and one with the camera yesterday.

[atm]

16 hours ago, Toki said:

Those are some beautiful photos Adam. Especially the one of the Boshi. May I ask where you had the light come from for that one?

Thanks. If I remember correctly, I had a naked bulb on the mune side and within a couple of feet of the sword. I held the nakago of the sword and kept adjusting its angle relative to the lens as I took photos. That's probably one out of 20+ I took in that position. Photos of the other side of the sword were also good for showing the activity in the boshi, but it shows the reflection of the phone.

[ROKUJURO]

Hi Adam,

very nice picture! 

You can avoid reflections in case you have a dark room or a photo box.

Btw: It is NAKAGO, not Nagako.

[atm]

Thanks @ROKUJURO. That’s a typo. My fingers were typing faster than my brain!

[Lexvdjagt]

 

This is one of my latest images in my ongoing battle to achieve Japanese dealer-like images. Photographing on plexiglass with a dark background. Using large LED lights to light the blade from both angles with a camera above. In this case, I removed the background in post in Photoshop and then composed the two images of the tanto together. I was taking some inspiration from Darcy's guide (can be found in the Links section, although the link does not seem to work anymore). I will add the guide to this post. 

Photographing_Nihonto.pdf

[Brian]

The article is in the downloads section

[Brano]

The topic of how to photograph Nihonto appears here regularly
Here you will find a few posts on the subject of how to photograph Nihonto

 

All you need:
macro lens with manual focus
at least an APS-C sensor in the body (FF is ideal)
tripod
remote shutter release for the camera
several light sources
... and above all a lot of patience

 

I am attaching a few photos of kissaki

 

 

 

 

[CSM101]

All you need to learn is how to avoid reflections. The rest is easy then.

[Toki]

6 hours ago, Lexvdjagt said:

Photographing on plexiglass with a dark background

Thank you so much. I read something similar in Darcy´s article and am working towards a setup like that in the future  

 

 

5 hours ago, Brano said:

All you need:
macro lens with manual focus
at least an APS-C sensor in the body (FF is ideal)
tripod
remote shutter release for the camera
several light sources

 

I have an APS-C sized camera at the moment, although no macro lens (yet). The Tamron is nearing macro level, but of course no comparison to a dedicated one.  
Also that 2nd, close up shot looks insane!

3 hours ago, CSM101 said:

All you need to learn is how to avoid reflections. The rest is easy then.

 

Indeed, they are the bane of me for now 

[Schneeds]

There are several considerations with respect to the lens: focal length, minimum focus distance, and optical quality. 

 

Ideally you want a fixed focal length lens (prime lenses will always have greater image quality than a zoom at comparable focal length), be in the ~100mm range or greater, and have a small minimum focus distance (just a few inches).

 

The minimum focus distance will vary across the focal ranges on lenses so you have to pay attention to that as well. 

 

DXOmark and Lenstip are good resources for image quality comparisons.