Rotating Whale Tooth w/ Scrimshaw

[Buddy Thomason]

You may say, "Buddy, son, don't you have anything better to do than this?" Well, apparently not. I mean, it is knife photography, sort of.

This puppy might take a little time to load up for ya - but not nearly as much time as it took me to make it.

[Buddy Thomason]

There is actually more to this story than just idle fun. I've been a lazy photographer. The truth is, before this little exercise above I'd never used the manual exposure mode on my camera. Oh, I might take control of just the shutter speed or just the aperture if I wanted to blur the action or blur the background - or get a lot of depth of field for a landscape shot. But I'd let the camera handle all of the related exposure functions automatically. Nor had I ever explored any options for white balance outside of 'automatic' even though my camera (and probably yours too) makes it easy by offering pre-sets like 'sunny' or 'shade' or 'flourescent' etc.

Last year I put together a 6 frame panorama of a dramatic "Hawg Spear" made by Mark Williams. But because I was afraid to break out of the 'automatic' box, each of the 6 exposures was different - so different in terms of color that I had to spend a whole day fiddling in photoshop to get the shading and color tones to sort of match up. Here are links to the results of that project:
BEFORE blending
http://www.fototime.com/44654542E78E739/orig.jpg
AFTER blending
http://www.fototime.com/303245C0BA4C3BB/orig.jpg

At the time all I knew was that there had to be a better way. I posted the panorama images on a couple of photography forums and quickly learned from the responses that, among other things, the key was manual exposure and selection of the correct white balance. I vowed to learn those two things and it has taken me about a year to get around to it.

The 'rotating whale tooth' image is actually 16 separate shots of the knife, clamped in a vise that will rotate in a horizontal plane. I used a very dark plum (almost black) velvet back-drop that wouldn't reflect any light, and one small soft-box aimed at the ceiling to bounce the light back onto the knife in an even more diffused state. I also used various white foam-board pieces to block as much as I could of unwanted reflections of stuff in the room off of the mirror-polished blade and brass guard. I could've done a better job on that aspect of this project but that was not my main purpose.

After the set-up described above I hooked up the remote shutter thingy so there wouldn't be any movement of the camera during exposure caused by my finger depressing the shutter button on the camera body itself. I took a series of pictures using each of the white balance pre-sets and decided the one that looked the best was 'flash.' I then shot maybe 40 different combinations of manually selected shutter speed and aperture. The combo that looked the best given my lighting (and gave the best histogram) was 1 second at f11.

Then it was a simple matter of shooting 16 exposures. After each one I rotated the vise enough so that I ended up with a full rotation of the knife. As you can see, it's not perfectly centered or straight up and down all the time - but my main goals of having each of the 16 frames be exactly the same exposure in terms of color, tone and temperature etc. were easily achieved.

I wish I'd cleaned up my photography act in these two areas (Manual exposure control and manual white balance control) a lot sooner. On the other hand I'm really happy that I now have those 'wepons in my arsenal' and will never be afraid to use them again.

[Ron Aggus]

Buddy, all I see is just one single exposure. I use the Firefox browser so maybe thats the problem.

[BoyNhisDog]

Very clever work Buddy. I have Firefox and see it all.

[Moosehead]

Very cool, Buddy! :cool:

I like the scrimshaw as well.

Cheers!

David

[TexasJack]

Too cool for school!

[chuckbop]

Nice Image Buddy, and thanks for the tip of doing a photomerge on a longer blade (or hog spear) . I had never thought of that. Duhhhhhhh.......Should solve some of the problems I always have photographing a long blade. Can't wait to try it....Chuck Ward

[Stephen F]

I love this sort of image - good job Buddy.

One of my photographic ambitions is to have a go at the multiimage "3D" sequence that you see emply in many movies (Matrix opening sequence), but as far as I know you need some pretty specialised equipment for that.

I too have found manual exposure and preset white balance to be an essential part of studio composite still life.

Stephen