Weekly Wrist Shot: Week 40

Here's this weeks daily watch line up. Enjoy the wrist shots!

Monday, 03 Oct. IWC Pilot's Watch Chronograph 3717 to start the week


Tuesday, 04 Oct. From Swiss to Japanese, the Vintage Seiko 6138-0030 Chronograph Square Eyes Kanji takes over


Wednesday, O5 Oct. Continuing the Japanese take over with the Seiko SNKF11K1 BFS


Thursday, 06 Oct. Getting ready for another wet day with the Seiko Diver's Watch 7002-700A


Friday, 07 Oct. Started the week with a pilot, so I ended it with another pilot with the Steinhart Nav B-Uhr II 44mm Automatic


HAGWE!

Weekly Wrist Shot: Week 39

Last week, I posted for the very first time my daily rotation of watches. I was surprised that in so short a time it barged into my top 10 posts.

So I thought of doing it every week. Here are the wrist shots for this week.

Sunday. 25 Sep. Seiko SKX779 Black Monster while having the car washed

Monday. 26 Sep. Seiko SKNF05K1 BFS to start the work week on a gloomy Monday

Tuesday. 27 Sep. Steinhart Nav B-Uhr 44mm Automatic to welcome typhoon Pedring

Wednesday. 28 Sep. IWC 2717 Pilot's Watch Chronograph, back to work.

Thursday. 29 Sep. Laco Type B Pilot's Watch, last time I wore this shirt I wore this watch too.

Friday. 30 Sep. Seiko SNKF07K1 BFS. Have a good weekend!

Wrist Time with Wrist Shots

I haven't been a good blogger the past couple of weeks after I came back from my international assignment. That doesn't mean I haven't been a good watch idiot.

I've been good to my collection and have given each some wrist time this past week.

Here's the previous weeks line up.

Tuesday. IWC 3717 Pilot's Watch Chronograph


Wednesday. Laco Type B Pilot's Watch


Thursday. Seiko SNKF07K1 BFS (Big Freakin' Seiko)


Friday. Steinhart Nav-B Uhr 44mm Automatic


Monday. Seiko 6138 Square Eye Kanji


Tuesday. Seiko SNKF09K1 BFS (Big Freakin' Seiko)


Wednesday. Seiko 7002 Diver's Watch

Watch Photography: Seiko Black Monster with the iPhone

Over the weekend I took my Seiko Black Monster for another dip, this time in the clear blue waters of Misibis Bay Resort. Misibis Bay Resort is only one of three hotels in the Philippines that is a member of the Small Luxury Hotels group, which as the name describes is a group of small luxury hotels (duh!) around the world.

Here is a shot of the BM while Im lounging by the pool. This was taken using the iPhone 4 camera, which I thought was quite impressive. Enjoy!

Here are some of the resort villas that I also took with the iPhone. If you ever drop by the Philippines, include this in our stop if you want a quiet, hassle free, luxurious vacation. All you need is a diver's watch and your all set!

Watch Photography: Removing the Haze on Crystals

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece on how to reduce unwanted reflections in cyrstals through the use of circular polarizers. With this piece I'm going to take this even further by reducing the haze present in crystals  that usually make dials look dull. This haze is what causes black dials to look oddly grey and those orange dials to look less vivid in photographs than what they really are in person.

This technique works best if the dial is already free from uneven/harsh reflections. We want to start with a dial that is already free from uneven lighting, and there are various ways of doing this: using CPLs, avoiding direct lighting, positioning watches propoerly wrt lighting etc. This again goes back to my principle of making sure you have the best raw image to work with so that you don't have to edit and modify a lot of pixels to get the result you need.

For this technique I will be using the same image I used in the CPL piece.

Here is the image of the watch with a CPL, cropped and post processed to getthe saturation and the color that I wanted.



If you look at the dial, it seems to be a muted dark grey which is far from the rich black that the Steinhart really has. But everything else in the image already looks great and further reducing the exposure of the whole image will just result to unwanted shadows and loss of details to shadows. So it's really just the dial that we want to enhance.

Using Adobe Photoshop, the first step is to select the dial. For this exercise I used the lasso tool and though I could have done a better job at refining my selection, this tool and technique will suffice for the purpose of this tutorial.


After selecting the dial area, the second step is to open Image>Adjustments>Levels. Here you will see the histogram of the image which is nothing more than the distribution of the pixels of the image based on tones. The more pixels there are in the right side of the histogram, the lighter the image is in general. The darker the image is, then the more pixels there will be on the left side.


The next step is to adjust the levels, where we will be trimming the histogram so that what's suppose to be black in the dial will be black and what's suppose to be white will be white. To achieve this, I slid the black slider to the right just before the first peak of histogram from the left and the white slider to the left just before the first peak of the histogram from the right. You will immediately notice the dial to suddenly go darker without affecting the "whiteness" of the indices and the hands.


The final image now looks as if there is no crystal on the watch and the dial can now be clearly seen. This results to more contrast between the dial, numbers and hands which makes the dial more legible and closer to what it really is in the metal without affecting the rest of the image which already has the right amount of saturation and contrast.


Hope you enjoyed the tutorial! Thanks for reading!

Watch Photography: Poor Man's Edwin H. Heusinkveld Technique/Set-Up

One of my favorite watch photographers in TimeZone is Edwin H. Heusinkveld. For me, he takes some of the best and cleanest dial shots and he uses an ingenious system of flashes, sheets of paper and trash bins.

Here is an example of one of his shots and below is the set up that he used to take the shot. You can read more about his set-up here. I've borrowed some pictures directly from that

I've been wanting to try this technique but I don't have the macro lens, the external flash (more so the four flashes he used in his set up!), a trash bin like that, and especially I'm quite far from having those really nice watches. I do have my built in flash, my 17-55mm lens and lots of paper though.

So with his set up in mind, and the materials I have, I tried to replicate his style. This is is the result with my Steinhart Nav B-Uhr II and my Seiko BFS.


Not bad but not really the look I wanted. With my single light set up, I definitely still had shadows in some areas of the watch, noticeable at the top part which is basically the surface that wasn't directly hit by light. and some highlights at the bottom part of the image. I'm happy though that the bond paper did a good job of diffusing the light, as I cant see too many harsh areas considering the built in flashes are known for direct frontal lighting that usually cause burnt highlights, especially on reflective surfaces. Another difference is my depth of field is too much, nothing like the bokeh and background blurring achieved in Edwin's images. This could be attributed to his Macro lens, which at 100mm can definitely create creamier bokeh than my 17-55mm lens. Another thing is that since my watches lay flat on the surface, I did not get the separation that was needed to really blur the  rest of the bracelet/strap as well. A watch stand would have been nice to create some depth between the dial, strap, and the background. I also noticed that this technique is unforgiving to scratches and smudges on watches. Next time, I need to do a better job of cleaning my watch.

I'm not sure if he applied some post crop vignette to  his images. I think he did because the top and the bottom parts of the images seem to have a black gradient going on but I cannot really say for sure because the corners are just all shadows. I definitely post processed mine to pull the black levels so that the background becomes completely black. Here are the unprocessed image of the shot above.


Here is the set up that I used for this exercise.
 

Here are some more images using the same technique.
 

Watch Photography: Polarizers Remove Unwanted Reflections On Watch Crystals

One of the biggest challenge in taking pictures of our precious watches is making sure that there are no distracting reflections on the crystal that would "cover", obstruct or provide an unwanted haze on the dial.

Of course, proper positioning of the watch relative to the light source and availability of AR coating on the crystal always help but there is another tool that can be effective in reducing, if not removing, unwanted reflections on the crystal.

from http://justinsomnia.org

This tool is the circular polarizer. I'm guessing most of you guys already know how this little filter works, especially those that have been into photography for awhile now. But for the uninitiated, a circular polarizer is a type of photographic filter that filters out light polarized perpendicularly to the axis of the filter. This has three applications in photography: it reduces reflections from some surfaces, it can darken the sky and it saturates the image more by eliminating unwanted reflections. If you want to know how it does that, literature is abundant around the net.

The circular polarizer is very simple to use:

1. Attach it to your lens
2. Rotate it until you see the reflections are reduced/removed (which means it is 90deg rotated to polarized light).
3. Take the shot!

Here is an unprocessed image of a landscape scene and my Steinhart Nav. B-Uhr II without a polarizer.

Here are the same scenes taken with a polarizer, not rotated 90deg to polarized light.

Here are the same scenes taken with a polarizer, rotated 90deg to polarized light.

Even from the unprocessed image, you can definitely notice the difference in the images that used a polarizer vs those that did not. In the watch photos, you can see that the reflection on the dial is reduced. The reflection on the strap is removed, thus making the color and texture of the strap more visible. The saturation of the photo is also improved. You can clearly see this in the wooden surface where the watch is on. The brown just looks richer.

Some will say that the effect of using a polarizer can easily be reproduced by post processing but this means editing and interpolating pixels. I'm not against post processing as I do it all the time too, but I find its always better to have a good base image where you don't need a lot of post processing to get the final result that you want.

Here is the final result after cropping, tweaking white balance, saturation and contrast.

The circular polarizer is a one time investment that's easy to use and in my view, is useful for so many different photography applications. I would strongly recomemmend any photography newbies and enthusiasts to invest in one.

I hope this helps! Enjoy!

Watch Photography - The Closest I'll Ever Get to Most Watches

Collecting watches is such a visual and emotional treat that I cannot deny the enjoyment I get from looking at other people's watches. I like it so much that I thought it must also be enjoyable for other people to see my watches.

Here is a link to all the photos I have taken of my precious ones. Well at least those I've cared to process and publish.

Thanks for looking!