The Watch Experiment

Being stuck at home most of last week while fighting a cold left me with too much time on my hands. I've been wanting to try some shots with a watch, so I pulled out my well worn Timex and started experimenting. I ended up with a nice image, started to upload it on here, looked at it closer and decided nah, I can do better and went back to the drawing board. Two days later I think I'm satisfied enough to put up some of the results.

I'm not even going to try and explain the lighting and set up details except to say that depending on the image, there was a combination of two Vivitar 285HV flashes, an LED headlight, a Bogen/Manfrotto magic arm, a Bogen/Manfrotto articulated arm, a sheet of chromolux craft paper, several plain white reflector cards and a couple of makeshift snoots for the flashes fashioned from sheets of craft foam. Each of the three shots required a lot of positioning, tweaking, re-tweaking, more re-tweaking and so on.

In Photoshop each of the images went through my normal procedure of some minor cropping, sharpening, some brightening in curves, contrast adjustment and retouching. And of course, after a lot of consideration, I decided this one shot looked better in black and white.