Lighting without Lighting Equipment
This past summer, we decided we needed more lifestyle photos of the watches that Raymond Weil currently carried. Kind of “how to dress your watch” or what situations would you wear a watch? We were struggling with creating even lighting under the halogenic lights of our Madison Avenue office and chose to take the watches outdoors.
When you don’t have the proper equipment or know-how – shooting outdoors can be an easy solution for getting high-quality photos without the effort of shooting in a studio. If you’re looking to get soft even lighting, a partially cloudy day would work perfectly. This is how we were able to get the watch so evenly lit without any reflections disrupting the image.
But what if you want to shoot indoors, in an environment?
This can be more challenging in general, you’ll obviously have to find a place, restaurant, cafe, wherever you may be shooting that has decent lighting. As previously said overhead, high-ceiling, florescent lights will only end up being a nightmare to shoot in. For this situation, it either caused the watches to be too dark or the light would reflect directly into the camera-lenses making the images unusable when shooting in our office. We were lucky enough to find a hotel; that although had very dim mood-lighting, was actually perfect for capturing the right reflections off of the steel of the watch case. Throughout the hotel was lit with spotlights angled from the ceiling and table lamps. We were able to set up shop by a West facing window as the sun was about to start lowering to set.
The window was able to give the watches the even-lighting that we needed to properly capture the details of the dial, and the ambiance lights surrounding us including the lit candle from behind the watch gave it a dramatic look.
Camera
The camera used for this shoot was the Nikon D80 although I am personally more comfortable using a camera with an auto-focus when shooting, such close up photos and trying to pick up specific details on the watch dial a camera with a manual focus was the right choice for this situation. However, with that being said I feel when using a camera with a manual focus you’ll end up with more bad shots than good ones (unless you’re a pro with these types of cameras), so it’ll be more of a numbers games when shooting each specific scene.
Another con with using this camera that because we did have some difficulty with getting the camera to focus where we wanted it to, each shoot took longer and with very little time and daylight left. But this camera ultimately ended up being perfect when needing to focus on such tiny details like the number and embossed logo that cascaded the dial of these beautiful timepieces.