Lighting Watches with one flash by Nick Fancher

4/10/2012 ISO 1200 Magazine 0 Comments

Your goal, when lighting watches, is to illuminate the face, without getting glares from your strobe or from ambient light.

This is a tricky task.

The tools I am working with a a LumoPro LP160 strobe, silver umbrella and an LP621 mini-boom arm for my stand. The strobe is being triggered by a Radiopopper JRX remote.

As you can see above, I have a piece of cardboard, covered in black cloth, placed on a stool. The light source is about 4-5 feet above the watches.

I then angled the watch faces at a 45 degree angle to the light source.

I turned off the overhead lights, rather than cranking up the flash output to kill the ambient, in order to conserve battery life. However, if I had been shooting a watch with an illuminated display, the only way to capture that would be with a slow shutter speed, so there could be no other competing ambient light.