Time Trial

|| Rather than pound away at the standard stuff that I like to shoot I decided to challenge myself and take on something new. I bought the cheapest metal watch I could find at Target, a few pieces of black poster board, and some tape. After rigging up the watch on a Bogen Magic arm to suspend it above table, I positioned a few pieces of black poster board to flag off light spill, set up two used SB-80dx (one optical triggered and one firing from a Pocket Wizard) and used a third piece of black poster board as a black background (but with proper lighting you can turn even white background black). Once shot I dumped all the images into Adobe Lightroom and then directly transferred to Adobe Photoshop CS6 Beta. Once in Photoshop it was just a matter of curve, level, and tone adjustments along with some clone-stamping and patching to correct watch imperfections and dust spots. Honestly the WB isn’t the best between the images, but this was a trial run. Also because this watch is budget-grade it has imperfections I didn’t bother correcting. Ultimately I learned quite a bit about specular highlights, controlling reflections, product styling, image correcting, the difficulties of managing flags, etc. Solid exercise with a valuable payoff. ||

Equipment Used

  • Canon 5D Mk II @ 200, f7.1 / RAW
  • Canon 100mm 2.8 Macro Lens @ manual focus
  • 2 Pocketwizard Plus II Radio Transceivers
  • Bogen Magic Arm
  • Bogen Super Clamp
  • 2 beat up Bogen 9ft Light Stands
  • Black Poster Board, white poster board & a grip of spring clamps
  • Adobe Photoshop CS6 Beta