You start with the lighting, which needs to be even and diffuse.
A bright but overcast day should give you the correct lighting, but watch for the blueness in the light, which may or may not be automatically dealt with.
A large "north" facing window will also act as a large diffused light source, and give a bit of directionality to the light, which if carefully handled will give a better contrast than a large open sky out doors.
You may need to add diffusion by hanging a net curtain or something like that over the window, but this also means you will lose light, so be careful with what happens to shutter speed and aperture. A tripod needs to be regarded as pretty well essential, or bracing yourself on a strategically based chair.
Once you get the overall lighting set up, it may well be fine. BUT in fact this is where the fun begins, because by carefully positioning white card to reflect light into the darker areas, or black card to darken areas by reducing the light being reflected, plus mirrors to focus some highlights into the image you can fine tune the lighting.
Does your camera have a bracketing facility or a manual facility. Taking a range of different exposures will give you more chance of getting one that has the right balance.
Which software are you using for the final image, many have a highlight recovery feature that can pull some detail back in.
The picture you have isn't that far away, a slight change in camera angle to reduce the direct reflections from the handle of the front knife and a little less exposure and I think this would have been OK.
Although, I used to make a living photographing shiny things (not knives) with a well kitted out studio I tend to now a days just shove things like this on a window ledge, work at getting the camera angle right to minimise reflections, and then get some kitchen foil to reflect some light back into the shadow areas. Or take it outside on an overcast day, but still use a reflector to "lift" the shadows.
You could also try making some sort of light tent, something I used to use a lot, and if I was churning out knife photos I might look at doing this. see
http://digital-photography-school.com/how-to-make-a-inexpensive-light-tent for a DIY version.
Graham