Well a lot has happened recently that I guess I should divulge. I had the good fortune of meeting the owner of Sonbol watches, a fairly new watch manufacturer based in the US, and was asked to produce some images for their product catalog and website. All their watches are 54mm, which is fairly massive, and the majority showcase 21 Miyota Automatic movement. Sonbol basically gave me total creative freedom to do whatever I wanted with the images and also allowed me to request as many watches as I wanted to shoot. I ended up requesting these six seen below.
 | HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/png' |
For each watch, I plan on shooting a different series with a concept based off of the watches color scheme. I have shot two images so far, averaging right around 8 or 9 hours of shooting and editing per image. The first watch I shot was the Black/Gold Sonbol Doobie. I had photographed watches once before and I had forgotten how difficult it was. Unless you have a million lights, it is almost impossible to capture everything in camera on one shot. To make things worse, a lot of the watches are black. Now everyone here knows black cars are difficult to shoot, but I will tell you first hand, black watches are even harder.
The concept for the gold watch was based off of actual gold. I created some improvised gold dust by spray painting a massive amount of kosher salt gold. I don't think the gold dust photographed nearly as well then it actually looked in real life. Later in the series, I plan on making a giant gold bar stamped with the logo of Sonbol and composing a shot with this watch wrapped around it.
| HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/png' |
Here are a few behind the scenes shots.
| HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/png' |
| HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/png' |
The second watch i shot was the Black/Orange Doobie. I think all photographers are pyros at heart, so I'll use any excuse to involve fire in my photography. I knew I wanted one of the shots in this series to look like the watch is literally burning, but I obviously wasn't about to burn a $850 watch. So, I constructed one out of foam core and burnt it instead. The watch itself is stripped together from 6 images. The fire was created largely from two images and a bit of photoshop.
| HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/png' |
Here are the 8 images used in the final image.
| HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/png' |
And an animation of the process coming together.
| HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/png' |
