I have just changed from film to digital and find it much easier any comments

Oh yes ...

Digital all the way for us. I tried film, before the technology caught up, but we have our digital patched into a tv monitor and can see the shot before we "snap" the shutter ... it's great! All of our work is digital now. Of course, you have to use a quality digital to get decent shots, but I'm well pleased.

Welcome aboard!

Alex

Before I had my digital camera, I used to spend so much money on paying the extra whatever to get my pics on a disk. Then there was the wait period of having to finish a roll, of film, drop it off for development, pick it up from development, etc. On top of all that, there was no guarantee the pics I took looked good (usually they didn't).

I traded a knife (not one of mine) for a Kodak DC-215 camera. That was one of the best investments I have ever made. That camera paid for itself.

A number of factors made me decide to go all out and purchase a top of the line digital. My first digital was great, but I started to see limitations in its usage. It was only a 1 megapixel camera and I found it would not take a good pic of a knife that filled the frame. The macro setting would not allow me to get far enough back to snap an entire knife (hence all my angled shots) and the regular setting would not allow me to get close enough before the picture blurred. My new camera does 3.4 megapixels. On top of that, the battery compartment latch broke on the old camera and I had to do always hold it closed when I took pictures or uploaded to the computer. that got old very fast. The nail in the coffin was the photo contest. I kept watching everyone improve and my pics were all looking the same.

The great thing about a digital is that your available knives are available immediately after you finish then. I think it would be very difficult to sell knives over the internet without pictures. I put a knife up for sale this weekend and it was sold in less than 24 hours. The customer wanted to know options on a sheath and I was able to go to the shop, take side by side shots of two different sheaths and send him the pics so he could choose exactly what he wanted. That is power.

I'm not going "Digi" anytime soon. For most of my pics I use a cheap Umax scanner and an image editing program to make it presentable for Net vieving. I admit it does have it's limitations, but so does any format. When the scanner doesn't give me what I need I will go to film. I have cameras from 35mm to 2 1/4 square to 8" by 10" view cmaeras, and right now there isn't a digicam at any price that can match even the 35mm film quality. Rather than investing in a digicam I intend to buy an Epson scanner with the transparency adapter so that I can shoot 35mm slide film and then scan them for Net use. I've tried Kodak Photo CD's and they aren't a cost effective for my use. An alternative would be to shoot 35mm color negative film and send it to one of the websites that process your film for $1 a roll and offer Album space so that they can be used on the Net.

Don't get me wrong I'm not anti-digi, I think they're great and will only get better. Maybe I'm just too old to make the change or just too darn cheap. With that said, my real point with posting here is to say that there are other ways to get great images of our knives.

Phil, When I get home tonight, I will post a link to an unedited, full res digital pic (I chop 'em and optimize 'em for to be web friendly). A quality digital camera will definitely match the pic quality of a comparable 35mm. The technology is there. In its highest mode, my camera will take a 16 Meg Tiff...only one pic will fit on the 16MB card. It boggles my mind to imagine the quality of that pic, conditions all being the same, compared to traditional film media.

Here is a link to a pic. This was one of the very first pictures I took with this camera. It is at night under 100% flourescent lights. There has been no editing done to the picture. Imagine what someone with talent could do with this:)
web.tampabay.rr.com/bbdogg/coolpics/srjstag01.jpg (http://web.tampabay.rr.com/bbdogg/coolpics/srjstag01.jpg)

The feathers were not sharp, but the handle and your name were sharp, the point of the knife needed more light or depth of field otherwise great!!!