A place to politely discuss the tools, technique and culture of photography.
This is not a good place to simply share cool photos/videos or promote your own work and projects, but rather a place to discuss photography as an art and post things that would be of interest to other photographers.
Before he made some very pretty watches, he was a photographer. One of Ming thein’s early articles involves a three piece article about his approach on how he photographed watches.
https://blog.mingthein.com/2012/03/05/watch-photography-part-one-introduction/
Paging u/GastonFoster
https://youtu.be/1HmPMgdjjjU?si=2vdm3WN63nMBC0bb
Love this guy's product photography videos. Here's one with a watch.
Take a piece of paper and bend it over the watch. Ideally you want to have a neutral colored sphere arounf the clock, with only one opening for the camera lens. Try to get as close to this as your background and environment allow, to eleminate all abjects that your clock could reflect. You will need a reasonably strong lightsource (flash) too, because the cover will suck up a lot of light.
Easiest setup for details: Just take a piece of printing paper (or tape 2 together if you need more space). Bend it over a surface and tape it down, so that you create an arc. Flash or lightsource over the paper. Some nice background behind the arc, watch under the arc, and shoot it through the remaining opening. For larger setups it gets tricky, but diffusing all lightsources will help
A lot of these are done in studio with a backdrop edited in. You can see the studio reflected in some of the watches.
It’s all light control. I recommend you to watch Karl Taylor on YouTube with special attention to lighting reflective surfaces.
Usually when I have to shoot social campaigns for jewelry with my wife, I end up grabbing a reflector with a black side and use it to control the reflections of the product surface - it looks like those photos.
I’ve never tried the polarizing filter for product photography. Hell, I’ve never heard or seen anyone recommend it. Reading about it here for the first time.
Here’s Karl’s channel showing the principles of lighting in two minutes (forget the cone just use a dark room) https://youtu.be/y7uBr6CnTF8?si=PdMjA-G_uaH1cvY6
Just take the time
Use flags to block reflections on the face. Set the time to 10:10 so that the logo is visible. Remove dust in post.