Blade edge reflections

[Huang]

I'm sure some of you guys who have been doing this for a while know this, but as a relative newbie I noticed the other day the way the light reflects on your edge is important. Subtle differences in the reflection of the edge are an indicator of how uniform your sharpening efforts are.

When I was checking for a burr I was dragging the blade across the stone to the left. The right edge was slightly ground down just a little bit more. The blade seemed square, but... I now totally lift the blade off the stone and slide it off of the support bar. My final step is a 16,000 water stone and I could not figure out why I had to spend so much time on the water stone. I hope this helps someone achieve all this awesome system (T8) is capable of.