Cooking Light - Strobist Lighting 102 Assignment

The assignment was to photograph kitchen utensil(s), an ordinary object, elevated to a form of "high art." Here's my entry:

Now, how did it all start? Using an opaque sheet, I tried to find the reflective angle. That was the hardest part of the assignment. The camera was set at one angle, and just opposite (at the reflective angle) was the SB-80DX flash, with Kleenex. I tried to use an 8 1/2 x 11" piece of paper, but had to gravitate to a 8 1/2 x 14 so that the entire set of knives were lit as shiny & sharp. Here is my poor effort:

Followed by an almost good effort. Note the background (the white platform on which the knives laid, looks gray).

To get the background white, I turned off the SB-80DX flash and put on the D200's built in flash at manual 1/8 power. That whitened up the background:

Now I turned on the SB-80DX (slightly more exposure than 1/8 power, after adjusting it for whiter sheen) , and the shot you see at the beginning was the result.

Time for experiment: 52 minutes, mostly spent on getting the angle of reflection and finding the right sized opaque sheet size.