Personal Project
I had been wanting to try my hand at photographing a watch, but had been intimidated because I hear everywhere that watches are notoriously difficult to photograph. Shinola is one of my favorite brands out of Detroit, and now that I have been doing product shots in my home studio space I finally decided to give it a try.
After watching numerous tutorials I sourced the light modifiers that I needed, and started shooting.
Final Edit
Rigging this shoot was difficult, I only have 5 C-stands and I had to work with the resources I had on set. I used stand with a boom arm to clamp onto a White Hard Foam square prop, this is what I set the watch on in the raw unedited image. I used a cut out foam core board to rest my diffuser onto so that the watch would not have any black reflections on it. This was used to the same effect that the Light Cone on V-Flat World's website is for, except the one I bought was from Ikea and cost me $11, not $70 for a piece of plastic. I got this idea from a tutorial by Botviddson, on photographing watches.
With this now set up, I built the shoot one flash at a time.
The first flash, set up on the Left of the watch had standard reflector on it, I used a white foam core board to tether off part of the flash, that is what got me the night highlight on that side.
Left: No White Foam board
Right: Foam board
after that I went for the right side. For this I simply used a westscott projector attachment with a canon 85mm ultrasonic lens to focus the flash to a particular area. This is what got me the highlights on the crown.
To even out the rest of the exposure on the watch, I used another flash, this time the Goodox TT685 On Camera Flash. I was able to use this flash set to slave mode with the rest of my lights. I screwed it to a C-stand, and set it under the bottom of the Watch. Again using a white foam board to taper off the hard flash, and create a gradient to complement the curvature of the casing.
Finally, the last light was used to bring light to the top of the casing, and to act as fill for the rest of the watch. This was done, but place another flash towards the top of the watch. I had a standard reflector on it and had it facing at 90 degrees to the watch. The wall to my room was there, and I used the wall as a reflector and this is what filled in the rest of the fill light. I made sure that this flash was not too powerful so the rest of. the highlights I got onto the watch would not be over powered and lost.
The retouch process was very fun, and It was extremely satisfying to see this all come together after the most meticulous set up I had ever done for a shoot. Once I had finished my first edit, I posted it to my story on Instagram and an acquaintance of mine who is also a commercial photographer offered to write some more revisions that he saw. I welcomed his critique once he sent them back, I quickly got back to work and made some more revisions.
In conclusion, Watches are indeed the most difficult product I have photographed, but as a result, this shoot was the most satisfying shoot I have ever done. Building up to the perfect exposure one flash at a time felt like Christmas was already here when I got to the final image. I am really eager to do more work like this and continue getting better. I do not think this was too bad at all considering it was my first time photographing a watch, in fact I think it turned out great.
