OTS - over the shoulder
This one turned out pretty nice. I thank Coop for turning me onto the magic of a polarizing filter. I don't know how ya could do knife photography without one - mainly for controlling glare on handles and sheaths. That's the basis of this image:
The owner of this rig wanted the image to fit into a nice coffee-table sized binder, featuring knives from his collection, with all the particulars in text on the L side, and the 'museum' presentation styled photograph on the R.
The background is fabric, an American Elm log with two pieces of cocobolo wood as props for the knife and sheath, to tilt them toward the focal plane, around which is the window for focusing my lens at that distance.
The 'museum' look, as I imagine it, has a formality setting it apart from everything not worthy of... well, being in a museum. So, by extension I decided to eliminate ALL spurious reflections in the guard and belt buckle in photoshop. The blade actually required almost no touching up but the belt buckle especially was a mess, because of its continuous compound curves and highly reflective surface.
Style considerations meant desaturating all the metallic surfaces but for the brass frog and snap on the sheath etc. To keep it more realistic looking I introduced about 1% noise and worked in some shadowing.
The angle from the two lights was a mix of higher and then low with a lot of side light effect. I used reflectors elsewhere to bounce light around. The handle lighting was a particular challenge - how to bring out the 3D shape and show the grain without excessive hi-lights at certain angles.
One of the last tasks was to apply a very slight sepia tone filter to the whole image to very slightly bump color but mainly to keep the desaturated colorless metal from looking too sterile.