Among the sound business advice that is most often given to knifemakers who are getting started is to get good photography done on your work, it is the biggest tool in your PR arsenal. But I just finished an article for a major knife publication where I learned a valuable lesson that could save much of the future of custom knives and your own legacy.

Obviously, film and print photography are now dead, digital just beats it hands down. But it is more important than ever, for you to take charge of archiving your own high resolution images of your work. With everything instantly scaled down for quickly, and easily, sharing across social media apps, there are more images than ever out there, but very few that are of high quality publishable, resolution. The main source for the good stuff is from the professional photographers, but we have become entirely too reliant on them to handle it all for us, and not keeping high quality images ourselves.

In my article I wanted to include some images of makers whose work that inspired me and many others, some of the best, and most influential, makers in my lifetime, legends in our business. I couldn’t because most of them had no high resolution images to offer, I was referred to others who may have images of their work, but nobody kept them around.

Newer makers presented yet another challenge. I was promptly provided with nice looking photos of their work, but they came from a phone so that when I opened them, they were mere hundreds of pixels in size and not usable for publication. Then we had to hope that the photographer still had a high resolution version available.

So now I would add this advice to the photography thing- if you want to be remembered much longer that that last post you made on your phone, if you would like to be mentioned in an article five years from now, take charge of your own legacy and keep an archive of high resolution images in your possession.

Now you can say that printed publications are obsolete as well and thus your web pics will do, but it is not about printing- it is about processing and editing! Any publication, print or digital, love to do things like cut knives out of the background and other editing. Anybody who has ever worked with Photo-editors knows what it is like to lock onto features in high resolution editing vs pixelated images.

I would advise archiving images in something like tiff format, they don’t lose quality from compression like jpg, with at least 300 dpi, in at least 3000 pixels. This would essentially be an 8X10 at 300 dpi or better.