View Single Post
Old 18th July 2017, 11:39 PM   #25
A. G. Maisey
Member
 
Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 6,675
Default

Thank you Athanase for these new photographs.

We now have material that in my opinion has turned this thread into perhaps one of the most valuable threads in recent times.

Firstly, let me say this:-

WRONG WRONG WRONG:- MAISEY WAS WRONG

These new photos permit me to form a much better, and much more accurate opinion of the keris. David opined that we needed better photos, I should have listened to him, he's a pro, I'm not. I thought I could see enough to make legitimate comment from the original fotos. I was wrong.

So now I'll start again.

This is definitely an old blade, it has not been altered, added to nor detracted from in any way, however, the level of craftsmanship is somewhat less than good.

My comments in my previous post were incorrect in many respects, and this is one of the things that makes this a valuable thread:- we all need very good photographs to give any idea at all of what we are looking at. I thought I could see sufficient from the original photos : I could not.

In these new pics I can see exactly the degree of erosion that I would expect on an old blade, if we look at the erosion on the blade edges we can see that from the 4th luk to the point the edges are ragged. This tells us that the blade has been hardened from the point to the mid-point of the 4th luk, proof positive of age. Very, very few current era blades are ever hardened, and the form of erosion on this blade indicates natural erosion, not forced erosion.

The sogokan is now much more clear. It is not well done, but it is correctly done, the poyuhan was correctly sculpted, and loss of form can be put down to age.

The tikel alis:- clean, clear well formed, original.

The gandhik is very well sculpted, but at the expense of stealing material from the kembang kacang, which would have been rather slight, even when new.

The greneng is the big surprise to me:- it is correctly cut, the man who cut it knew what he was doing, but his level of knowledge was at pandai level, not mpu level. He has cut correct Mataram rondha, but has cut them poorly, and the complete greneng says less than it should. It was a major error on my part to try to read the greneng from the original pics.

Taking everything into consideration, I am inclined to give this keris as HB (yaitu Hamengkubuwana, atau Yogya).

Overall, it is a nice old keris.

I've learned a good lesson from this, and I hope we have all learned that decent photos can make a world of difference in an opinion.

ATHANASE
Re your photo difficulties.
If you have north facing windows looking out onto trees, and you are in the Northern Hemisphere --- which of course you are --- you are in an ideal situation to take very good keris or other photos.
I'm not a pro, as is David, but I have been taking keris photos for a very long time. I'm in the Southern Hemisphere and my situation is exactly similar to yours:- south facing windows looking out onto trees.
My suggestions to you would be to shoot from a tripod, use remote release, use a neutral backcloth, use bounce boards (three ply faced with aluminium foil) to throw light onto your subject. In processing you will probably always find that the image will improve by removing cyan. Sharpen. Never use a flash. To me, these are the essentials, anything else can be an extra.
A. G. Maisey is offline   Reply With Quote