The Field Knife Photography.

Headed out to Conondale National Park to do some product photos and video. It’s about an hour and half from home so nice and close. We’ve only been out here once before to check out Booloumba creek and falls, this time round the access road was closed due to recent heavy rainfall but still a pretty cool spot to drive around.

I’m usually pretty disorganised when it comes to taking knife photos and video, i don’t usually plan anything or have any specific shots in mind, in fact half the time i forget to even take any photos, it’s something i’m trying to work on more - to be more organised.

I like the idea of shooting knife pics in national Parks or the bush in general but we generally like to keep weekend exploring free from anytype of work, I have the same problem when i take the boat out fishing - i usually take a knife to photograph but get so caught up in trying catch fish that taking photos falls by the wayside. So anyway i’m making a concerted effort to do more outdoors content instead of just in the workshop.

Gear.

I’m not super nerdy when it comes to camera gear and i’m pretty much self taught in respect to photography and videography - (thanks youtube and skillshare) and i certainly don’t claim to be a photographer or cinematographer. So for me i like camera gear thats is easy to use and gets a great image without too much stuffing around.

For stills I’m using a canon R5 and a leica Q2 - with the R5 i generally use either the RF 24 - 70 f2.8 , the EF 70 - 200 f2.8 , But the most used is the EF 50mm f1.2 (which i love - i found it really difficult to use at first - just blurry as fuck images, but as i’ve progressed it’s now the go to lens.) I like the R5 as having previously had a Canon R, I just find it to be a super easy user friendly camera - the flip out touch screen is best. I also use it for occasional video, and i think the video image is amazing - it does take a little bit of patience to edit especially in Premiere Pro , but i do have an Atomos Ninja so can always record in Prores if i need to.

The leica Q2 is in a league of its own, it’s a small fixed 28 mm lens camera that can go anywhere. The image quality is pretty much up there with the best and with the added benefit leica style color. just an amazing camera - I use the leica in the workshop all the time, but like to use it outdoors because of its range - macro to wide and everything in between. Great hiking camera too - small, light and powerful - i like the video image out of this also - it’s limited in what it can do but the image straight out of camera just looks great.

For video I mainly use a Canon C70, it’s a 4k cinema camera with built in ND filters in a smaller body with the same sensor as a more expensive canon c5oo cinema camera. I’m not gonna lie it’s been a pretty steep learning curve going from a canon R for video to a C70, while i think it’s pretty fool proof to get a good image out of it, there’s still a lot more variables that go into getting a great image - sometimes i get a great image, sometimes i don’t. Most of the time i use the RF 15 - 35mm f2.8 lens for the versatility but again i love using the EF 50mm f1.2 on the C70. At the moment i’m using the Atomos Ninja to record on the C70, the Prores 422 makes editing a breeze, it’s not bad recording in camera but much prefer the Atomos ( the only downside being the huge file sizes ). I Shoot across most frame rates 25,50 and 100 for different stuff, but i have to say the 4k 100 fps is a dream.

As mentioned i use the Canon R5 for video as well, it’s light, quick and the image is amazing especially in CLOG 3 ( i mainly use CLOG2 in the C70 for the extra dynamic range - mainly in case i fuck up the exposure )

The drone I use is a Mavic 2 pro - a few years old now but for the limited use, it gets an awesome image. I mainly shoot the drone stuff at 50 frames per sec in DLOG, to date i’ve never crashed it ( knock on wood ) although i’m probably not as adventurous as some when it comes to drone flying, mainly as all i see is $2500 grand flying around the sky with only dodgy phone reception keeping it up there. I recently bought a GoPro Hero 10 and really only used it a couple of times so far, pretty amazed by the underwater still images captured from video, really just bought it to stick in the boat for when i catch monsters, so far haven’t needed it. haha

Sometimes we take everything out with us - it’s a lot - particularly if you add in tripods, batteries, small lights , etc, etc but then sometimes it’s just the leica and that’s it. On this occasion we took everything thinking we were going to go on a bit of an all day trek , but obviously didn’t turn out that way due to the weather.

So when going out to specifically take photos and video i’m trying to document as close to real life as possible, trying to tell a story of a place and the part a knife plays in that story, In this case i took out 3 different knives because i wasn’t sure what i was going to do ( organisation !) we ended up taking photos of the Field Knife - a small pack size utility knife perfect for odd jobs and light food prep duties, With the images i’m trying to focus on the end user and what they might want in a knife and then how to best show that - of course getting there is another part of the story so doesn’t hurt to add in a few car photos.

The Field Knife is available as a custom order, usually stainless steel with either a stabilised timber or resin based micarta handle. Sheath options are italian leather or kydex. You can jump on the custom order list HERE - it’s a small deposit to get the ball rolling and to guarantee your spot in the queue.

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