New sword, new photography equipment, new set up!

[hxv]

Greetings,

 

I have been revamping my photography equipment and photo station. I have also acquired a new sword - a Sue Sa naginata naoshi. After lots of tinkering with my set up, I took a few pictures worthy of posting for your enjoyment.

 

Camera equipment: Canon XSi, Canon EFS 60mm f/2.8 macro lens, mounted on tripod, hooked up to my laptop via LiveView, IR remote trigger.

 

Lighting: Two monster 100W LED mounted on tripods. They illuminate almost tangentially on the sword: one from the kissaki side and one from the nakago side.

 

Sword: Sue Sa naginata naoshi , mounted on an apparatus that can be tilted and rotated in any direction, hands-free. So, absolutely no vibration on the sword or the camera equipment.

 

The background is black satin to eliminate reflection from the background into the lens.

 

Enjoy the pictures, and any/all comments regarding the sword, camera equipment, photography set up, shooting techniques, etc. are always much welcome and appreciated. My goal is to keep improving my pictures and there is no ego involved. I have a few other nice swords and tanto that I will attempt to photograph and will post them in due course.

 

Regards,

Hoanh

[hxv]

More pics.

 

Regards,

Hoanh

[echizento]

Excellent pictures, wish I could takes pictures as nice as these. Love the activity on the blade also.

[Gabriel L]

Hoanh,

 

Nice work bringing out both the hada and hamon simultaneously!

 

[Bond]

Nice photos and a nice blade Hoanh.

What was the ISO?

You have no vibration, its better to use 100 to avoid noise and to have clearer images

[ancientnoob]

This is am amazing looking sword with even better photos. Wonderful!

[Adam M]

Agreed, High quality photos on a lovely sword

[Stephen]

LOL was expecting to see pix of the new set up, ?? ok?

nice what it can do lets see the lay out

[Marius]

Stunning!

[CSM101]

Okay, just a few words from my side:

 

Your photos have ISO 800 and this is too much. You can see a lot of noise in the dephts. Set it to 100 or at least 200.

 

With your Canon Camera you got DPP as a RAW-Converter. So you should correct white balance, dephts, light, black and white. After that, there is more visible than you think.

 

And with Photoshop you can change the background to black. You don´t need black satin, but it helps.

 

Here are two of your photos and so you can compare before/after.

 

Uwe G.

 

 

PS: NICE SWORD.

[hxv]

LOL was expecting to see pix of the new set up, ?? ok?

nice what it can do lets see the lay out

 

 

 

Stephen: Here is my set up. It shows my rig to hold the sword in place. The sword can be tilted and angled as I wish. I have tested this rig with a 29" daito (the biggest one in my collection), a naginata naoshi (as shown in picture), and a tanto. They all fit into this single all-purpose rig. The laptop shown is connected to my Canon XSi with LiveView so I can see on the computer screen what I will get before I take the picture. An IR remote trigger helps a lot in eliminating unnecessary camera movement. The pictures taken are stored directly on my laptop. After a shooting session, I can simply detach the USB cable and take the laptop to my desk to choose/edit/crop the pictures.

 

Bond: Thank you for the comment. I used the camera in Manual (M) mode. The graininess is due to the fact that in order to capture a fairly large chunk of the sword in focus, I had to reduce the aperture. This is a Canon 60mm f/2.8 lens, so with fully opened aperture, the depth-of-field is fairly limited. As I reduce the aperture, I have to increase the exposure time to compensate, hence the noise, or graininess. I notice the graininess, too. For close up to show details of hataraki or for pictures of tosugu, the Canon 60mm f/2.8 is perfect. For suguta, I can back up the tripod sufficiently far to use this same lens, or switch to the crappy kit lens (18-55 mm f/4.5) since I don't need to see details. For intermediate applications such as pictures posted in this thread, I think I need another lens for better quality. Any suggestions for a lens?

 

Uwe: Thank you! How do you change the background to black in Photoshop? This is a trick I would like to learn. Haven't figured it out yet.

 

Thank you all for the compliments on sword and pictures. This is a beautiful sword that I truly enjoy studying.

 

Regards,

Hoanh

[Gabriel L]

Hoanh,

 

Nice work and thanks for showing the setup. However, unless something is getting corrupted (which I doubt), Uwe is right; here is the metadata from one of your images:

 

 

ISO 800 — 60mm — 0ev — f/29 — 1/50

 

Since you are on a tripod, there is no need for ISO 800 and 1/50th sec. shutter speed. You could use ISO 100 and 1/5th sec. shutter speed and get (close to) the same exposure, but without the noise. It is possible to get noise from loooonnnnng shutter speeds, e.g. 30+ seconds, but that's not the culprit here, the ISO is. On an XSi, ISO 100 or 200 will be good, 800+ will show visible noise.

 

Also I am glad to see you stopping down a bit more to get more in focus front-back, but be aware that it becomes less necessary as you get farther from the subject. At macro distances a tiny aperture is required, but at mid-level distances like this you might (might!) get by with something closer to f/16, which ironically will give better sharpness in the zone of interest due to less diffraction softening. Just something to consider, I wasn't in the room with you so it's of course possible that f/29 was preferable at this angle to a bigger aperture.

 

In general though I think these photos are pretty nice, you're definitely developing some good techniques. Keep it up! Cheers,

 

—G.

[Bond]

Hello Hoanh!

First of all I would like to say again that you did a really good job

And if you want to push it even farther - you can do it with some simple improvements.

 

As Uwe and Gabriel said, ISO is an easy fix. Its only 3 steps up from ISO800 to 100, and to compensate the decreased amount of light you simply increase your exposure time with the same 3 steps - for example, from 1/30 to 1/4 or from 1/50 to 1/8. As I said, you have no vibration and changing to ISO100 is a low hanging fruit - it will give you visible improvement at no cost.

Gabriel very well commented on your selected apertures. I would only add that as you are using a constant light, you can also use aperture priority mode instead of fully manual mode. You would set the desired aperture & ISO and your camera will select a corresponding shutter speed for the right exposure. Then based on the result you can also adjust it up or down with the exposure compensation.

Plus Uwe added a very good comment regarding the RAW converter. Shooting in RAW will give you a huge room for correcting white balance (light temperature), exposure, shadows/highlights etc. DPP that comes free with you camera is a very simple and handy programme. Otherwise Adobe Bridge has even more possibilities to produce from your raw images the result that is closer to what you see with your eyes.

 

Regarding removing background in Photoshop, here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=photoshop+how+to+remove+background

check few tutorials and select whichever way seems easier to you.

 

And finally you asked about the lens. In my opinion 60mm macro is a good value for your described needs (and for the money). I would recommend you to use it even for the photos of sugata - it will have less distortions than 18-55. You will need some distance, though I understand you have enough space.

Or maybe you would like to look at some lightning sets - flashes/softboxes? Or maybe a scanner is what you need?

Could you please post few examples of the pictures that you would like to make?

 

Cheers!

[Stephen]

Very nice set up can offer advice but you have plenty of that here. Looking forward to more of you pix.

[DanC]

If you are computer literate enough to shoot RAW and digitally correct, I would suggest disabling your flash and reflecting your lights off white paper instead of shining directly on the object. With a tripod, exposure time is a moot point, I have taken photos at night without a flash, using a 30 second exposure ( no, I don't mean 1/30th).

 

Basically, just turn off the camera auto settings and keep trying different aperature/exposure times and lighting setups then pick the one that turned out best. That's the good thing about digital, taking a hundred photo's costs the same as taking one.