Thanks detron!So here are the final two shots. After the contest deadline was past I reviewed the earlier shots and made some tweaks to the layout and the lighting. One of my friends pointed out that the digital clocks were out of sync so I fixed that too (if you're going to be OCD, be OCD). I decided to skip the box idea, and the "big knife in all four corners" idea ended up looking too much like a QR code for my taste so that got dumped too. I did end up with one shot with the center logo and one without. The full res image (6000x4000) is big enough to have a poster printed from it, so I'm going to order one this week and see how it turns out. Click the thumbnails below to see larger images. With logo (472 knives):And without (477 knives):
Thanks for all the info about taking the shot, I enjoyed reading about it And I had a quiet chuckle to myself when I read "(if you're going to be OCD, be OCD)". I think there are a few people on MTo who can (or should) identify with that statement (including me)
A couple people were asking how I got the shot. Here's probably more info than you want to know. When I started this project, I didn’t really understand how much of a pain it would be. I am an amateur photographer to say the least – I really know embarrassingly little about photography. Fortunately, my sister is a professional photographer and she helped figure a lot of things out. Starting off, my goal was to get as many knives in the shot as possible. The goal was 300+ (final number was 472, so better than I hoped for). To maximize the number of knives in the shot, I figured I’d lay them out in an area the same dimensions as the image sensor in the camera. I took this shot with a Nikon D610 full frame DSLR which has a 36x24mm sensor. Since 6x4 was my target ratio, the easiest thing to do was grab a full sheet of plywood (4 ft x 8 ft), use the full width and 6 of 8 ft of length, and use that as the base:(Image removed from quote.)I covered the plywood in white Kraft paper (that conveniently comes in 4 ft wide rolls). I knew lining up the knives without any guide would be a challenge, so I measured off and marked 1” increments along the side of the plywood and stuck thumbtacks in each line – 244 thumbtacks total. (Image removed from quote.)Then I took some white polyester thread and strung it between all the tacks making a grid:(Image removed from quote.)Then I tackled the layout. Started with the logo in the center and just build out from around that. I had a few goals in mind:1. Create an interesting pattern that didn’t have too much repetition in knife direction and style2. Show a lot of the different tools3. Represent all the different scale types and have a decent variation in color4. Include very important and historic models5. Show the basic evolution of the officer’s knife from 1890 – present. This is the purpose of the row of at the top. This took longer than I thought it was going to. Like A LOT longer. Like an amount of time I’m embarrassed to quantify so I just say “a lot”. (Image removed from quote.)With the layout mostly finished, I moved the plywood to the floor on top of a couple furniture dollies. This allowed me to roll the entire layout around to adjust it in frame, set up lights, fix the camera, etc. (Image removed from quote.)Now time for the first test shots. At first I tried to use the 50mm prime lens I usually keep on my Nikon for general photography. To completely frame a 6 ft x 4 ft area with a 50mm lens I need about 10 ft of distance between the camera and subject. Lucky for me the ceiling in my garage is 10.5 ft high, and there is a hole in it to allow access to the attic space above. So, I mounted the camera in the attic access hole (red arrow in the pictures above and below). (Image removed from quote.)I took some test shots. That’s when I ran into my first problem – distortion:(Image removed from quote.)The focal length on the 50mm lens is too short to shoot something this big without distorting it. You can see here how the edges of the shot aren’t even remotely square and are being bent in via barrel distortion. It most obvious on the long edges and in the corners:(Image removed from quote.)I called my sister and she said a longer focal length lens would help lessen the distortion. After debating several options, I decided to try an 85mm prime lens. For the same size subject this would allow me to move the camera back further, get the same area in frame but with a lot less distortion. I could have used a zoom lens (e.g. 70-200) but I was really concerned with preserving as much fine detail in the full res shot as possible. To get that sort of sharpness with a zoom lens would mean buying/renting a $2000+ professional quality lens. Not really in the budget. A pro quality prime lens, however, can be had for a little less than a consumer quality zoom, so that’s the route I went. With the 85mm lens I needed 14 ft of distance between camera and subject, so I set up my tripod in the attic:(Image removed from quote.)One of the most important factors to getting this shot to work is shown here: the remote tethering setup. I can power the camera from A/C power instead of a battery (blue arrow) and connect the camera to my PC via USB (red arrow). So the camera can stay on for hours while I set up the shot, and I can control the camera completely from software called CameraRC on my laptop:(Image removed from quote.)Live preview, shutter speed, aperture settings, ISO, focus point, and shutter release can all be remotely controlled from the software. I can take a shot, download from the camera that's 14 ft up in the attic, open the shot in Photoshop and check my settings and alignment. Straighten some knives out, tweak a few things in the layout (rearrange things that look odd, tighten up some spacing, etc), adjust the lighting, and do it again. Lather, rinse, repeat until I’m satisfied with the shot. Speaking of lights, this was the other fun part of the shoot – lighting over 450 shiny metal and plastic objects and taking a photo of them without pro levels of lighting gear is a challenge. A friend of mine has a photography business and suggested I get a lot of LED work lights and point them all up, bouncing the light off the ceiling and wall to light the shot indirectly. So that’s what I did:(Image removed from quote.)And that worked great. There could have been more light, but with the camera on a tripod it wasn’t a huge deal – just slow the shutter speed down. I was able to get the shot fairly evenly lit with not a lot of heavy shadows on the knives. It left the background paper a bit greyish, which turns out I liked – it made the tools and the lighter knives stand out more. At the end it just needed a little color correction and clean up work in Photoshop - taking out dust specs, stray eyelashes, stuff like that. And done!Really the key to all this was my garage layout. I just got extremely lucky here. The height of the ceiling was perfect. Setting up the camera in the attic and shooting through the access hole worked perfectly. The fact that I painted my garage bright white (mainly to reflect as much light as possible when working on cars) worked out perfectly when lighting the shot.
@Vicman - Why oh why quote and duplicate the whole post You're filling up the threads for no reason That's two whole screen-fulls on my computer - and probably about 10 on a smart phone
This is truly fantastic! What an amazingly diverse collection. How long have you been collecting? Any inherited as well?I can imagine how satisfying the end result must have been - the collection of this scale deserves a tribute in deed.Kudos.Posting a picture I took last month of a part of my young collection, a moment of pride (until now) (Image removed from quote.)Hope it doesn't give you a complex
Seems like more of a system/layout problem than a Vicman problem.
A couple people were asking how I got the shot. Here's probably more info than you want to know...
This pic should at least be in the 2018 calendar... The process in taking this pic alone carries “a lot” of merits... Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
My wife had the logo version of the final image made into a puzzle. It is challenging to say the least!(Image removed from quote.)
Quote from: jazzbass on November 28, 2017, 09:43:23 PMMy wife had the logo version of the final image made into a puzzle. It is challenging to say the least!(Image removed from quote.)Where can we buy one?
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