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Retail price $859. On your wrist $189. In your pocket $670.

by joebar

Some of you may already be familiar with the magazine advertisement below.  It can be found in Maxim, Gear, and the like.  The photograph is excellent and the slogan is pretty good too.  Made me want to buy one, and I did.  Actually, two!

Anyway, for the Advertisement contest, I wanted to see if I could reproduce this photo with my own watch.  My copycat ad inspired several comments from people asking where they could buy one of their own! (click the pic above for larger version with phone number - or try searching for "Klaus Kobec" on Ebay).

My photo also received many comments asking about how I did the lighting.  You'll all probably be very surprised at how simple a setup I have.  No studio strobes, no soft boxes, nothing fancy at all.  I have a small tabletop "studio" set up in a closet, sitting atop a Craftsman workbench.  It's made up of two pieces of white foam board and a six foot sheet of plotter paper.  One piece of foam board is used as a base, the other piece is for reflecting the bounced flash, and the paper creates a nice seamless background.

Beautiful, isn't it?

Here is a crop of an early set-up attempt without bouncing the flash.  Flash was aimed right at the watch and as expected, produced ugly results (I was just shooting test shots, trying to position the watch in an appealing way).  Way too harsh, with very defined shadows.

Below is another stab at positioning the watch and one of my first shots bouncing the flash.  Nowhere near as harsh as the photo above, but I didn't really care for the angle too much, there were reflections of my hands and camera in the watch, and the shadows were still a bit too defined.

I needed something to soften the shadows.  This is where the invention of the Barodin hango-diffuser was born.  Yeah, it's two hangers with a piece of tracing paper taped to it.  Contact me for pricing. :) 

The full setup

Here's a shot using the diffuser.  Notice how most of the shadow is nearly completely faded away except for where the watch is touching the surface (and even that is much softer looking).  Still have some unwanted reflections around the 1 o'clock and 4-6 o'clock areas though. 

The reflection at the 1 o'clock position was from a bag to the left of the bench, and the other reflection was the camera and tripod.  To fix this, I moved one piece of foam board from the base to the left side of the bench to block out the bag and other junk.  To cure the other reflection, I simply attached a couple sheets of paper (with a hole cut for the lens) to the camera, and wrapped a white bag around the tripod.

After a ton of photos, positioning and repositioning, changing camera settings, etc., I got this shot which I was happy with.

Post processing in Adobe Photoshop 7.0 was as follows:

• Crop and resize to 640*480
• Auto levels
• Auto color
• Levels - blue channel increased a bit
• Small increase of contrast and brightness
• Unsharp mask - amount: 140%, radius: 0.4 pixels

The final Image

Rate This Tutorial!  2.916    Log in to rate this! 0 = Not Helpful up to 3 = Very Helpful. NR = No Rating. Questions? Feedback? Join the Discussion on this Tutorial