Here is a sample image of my own watch, just a simple wrist watch but one I’ve had for over 25 years and still ticking. In preparation for an upcoming product shoot I thought I would make a start and run through some lighting set ups and post processing.
The only things missing from this project is the macro lens I usually hire in for whats called focus stacking, This would enable me to have a series of images with the focus start at the front of the watch and the focus on the others slowly working there way across the watch to the back. Then in HeliconFocus software it would blend them all together to make one image with end to end sharpness.
Here are a few pics of my basic set up and lighting at home in prep for the shoot at the studio.
In this instance though I'm not using a macro lens yet! instead each image has various reflectors angled in directions to light up the rim of the watch and run through HeliconFocus in the same way.
After this process the rendered image is brought into photoshop to make a basic composite.
For me the process was ok but the sharpness is not there at the top of the pic, this is where the macro lens would play its part and not the 80mm lens I used here. Incidentally I cropped this image right down! I'm probably using about 8% of the actual image but the sharpness is still there due to the medium format camera being used, So yes not the right lens for this job but it didn't stop me from training on the rest of the process for this result.
I hope you found this practise run interesting and will post samples of the watch shoot as soon as possible.