Light box test

Living in a dark house and not always sunny, I acquired a light box to see if I can do better pics.

My skills are bottom rung but with better light maybe one foot up.

A busy dial is probably not the best beginner subject but go big or go home.

Bonus lume shot while shutting down

Could you tell me a little about your setup for this shoot? What is the lighting? Camera? Lense? Settings?

Thank you.

The main upgrade I made was buying a light box. Or you could probably DIY something like this with a bunch of LED panels.



Camera is just my iPhone for now. One trick I learned is to change the exposure if the watch looks over exposed or washed out with light. You’re better off with a lot of light to pick up as much detail as possible, but if it looks washed out then you dial down the exposure.

I do this by tapping the image I’m going to take to set the auto focus which puts a yellow square in the frame. Next to the square is a sun icon. If you drag that icon up or down you adjust the exposure up or down.



The other trick is do set the zoom to 2x. This gives you a relatively good depth of field and fairly natural perspective. 1x on the iPhone is a bit wide angle and can give the watch that bubble/ fish eye effect.

That’s about it and I just play around with adjusting the lighting brightness and exposure settings. I did find my wife’s old DSLR and a couple of lenses that go with that, but I haven’t tried to go crazy with a complicated camera or lenses yet.

Excellent. Appreciate the detailed response.

This one was the same set up but swapped the white background with green. The light box kit provided multiple color flexible PVC backgrounds. I recall having to turn down the brightness on the LEDs because I was getting too much reflection off the crystal.

Good to know. Thanks you.

More with a Squale diver. Having the light come from multiple angles definitely helps control glare and reflection issues. Now I probably need to start upgrading my camera capabilities. The middle picture has richer, warmer tone from the background than the other two pics with the same background.