New Time Keeper

My old watch broke this week. Might be an old battery (probably), but it was acting very weird so I thought why not just get something I know will last a while longer.

Enter Seiko watches. Don't know much about them, other than I love their watches. The one I got is an automatic 21 jewel one (whatever that means), so it never needs a new battery because it doesn't use one! It's powered by the motion of wearing it, very cool right? Plus it's sleek, thin, and metal. Perfect for me. The only thing that could be better would be if it lit up. But that would require a battery, which is a no no. It glows in the dark, and that's enough.

Just discovered Seiko makes a $27,000 watch...why...

Anywho, I used the same kind of set up I used for the last watch photo. The soft box on the right set to lowestttt power setting. On the left was a 560 with the grid on it. Nice big soft light to make nice specular highlights on one side, and the grid to provide some little highlights on the other side. I love using hard light as a highlights/backlight and then filling in the shadows and whatnot with soft lights.

In addition to the lights, I set up a big white reflector on behind the watch to throw some more light on the subject.

I tried shooting on black, with a pillow on black, with a pillow on wood, but I finally settled on white. Just white. Simple, elegant, cliche....but that doesn't mean it's not good. Maybe next time I'll try wood again. But for now, white works really well.

I shot at f7.1 (because lights were so close and very very bright), ISO100, and 1/200.

So editing...I went into Ps and selected out the watch from the background. I feathered this selection a  lot so make the transition zone larger and softer. I did this because I then brightened the area all around the watch, which helped make the whites much whiter and let the watch stand out more. I debated with making everything white, but left a little gradient here and there.

Then, I grabbed a logo off one of the other pictures with one of the pillows. Simply feathered the selection, applied the same brightening that I did before, and it blended in nicely.

Finally, in Lr I added a elliptical adjustment to the watch face to brighten the middle up a bit, and also increase the contrast. This made the face stand out more, which is nice because that's really what the photo is about. I also went through with a healing brush to get rid of some dust spots.

Side note: the last time I took a watch photo, I took it at 10:20 and thought that was late. Tonight, I took it at 12:30. Which isn't that unusual for me now...

See you tomorrow!