Lumebattle!

Thanks. I have a Canon 650D so I have to try this magic lantern stuff !

Come on... This is a great idea and I like this thread! 👍

Unfortunately not everyone of us (meaning me) can do such excellent video work.


Maybe you should explain how to do exactly and I would try to find some watches for a contribution... 😀

Nice tread! And the gif you’ve made is just awesome! Great to see the time lapse.

Unfortunately Must if my photos are taken with iPhone, for comparison a bit hard...

Well, the reason I did not go too deep into details is that for each step there are several options how to do it. And my choice of tools was not so much determined by what is easiest to use or most commonly available, but by what I had at hand and is therefore a bit geeky. The first session was more or less a quick and dirty job. The second became a bit more refined then ...

So what would one need?

1. A place to sit the watches, which should be completely dark during exposure and ideally provide a somehow representative and repeatable lightning scenery as a starting point. I found that on the bench of my work shop in the basement. It's as well lit as artificial lightning in a home envirnoment could be. I let the watches sit there in a watch box for one hour to charge to a consistent level.

2. In the meantime I prepared my camera (I use a Canon 6D) for the time lapse series with interval of 15 minutes. Manual exposure mode with the settings mentioned above. I got them by experimenting with the aim to find an exposure setting which does not lead to clipping when the watches are fully charged but still capture the luminousity after 8 hours.
Of course a tripod would be the best to provide stable framing but I guess creative solutions might be possible as well.
Regarding the time lapse function: I have already described a few possibilities in my discussion with @Folgono.
I fully understand that installing a custom firmware to a camera is not everybodies cup of tea and might also not be neccessary. I know that some Lumix and Nikon models have this feature on board but I am not an expert on camera equipment generally - except I know my own a bit. I did a quick google and found that there are quite a few sites out there on time lapse photography. So I would just recommend looking up "time lapse" and the name of whatever equipment you have at hand.

3. After switching the light off, starting the time lapse series and catching some sleep, I found 33 Pictures on my memory card the next morning. This could either be JPEG files or in my case the cameras RAW files to be developed in Lightroom. As I had been a bit sloppy when setting up the camera I needed to do some basic croping and rotating to the first of the first of the pictures - no exposure correction though - which I then applied to all other pictures and exported them to pic01.jpg ... pic33.jpg. Again, if you don't use a RAW converter, don't mind. You can use the cameras JPEGs directly. Maybe take care of setting the white balance from Auto to Daylight in advance to knock out any "intelligent" parts of your camera.

4. I now had 33 JPEG files and what I wanted to create is called "animated gif" file.
Being a lazy person I just used something I always have at hand. It's a command line tool called "ImageMagick" for Unix and Windows and I know more than 95% of people will not enjoy using that one.
But if you insist, the command would be "convert -delay 30 +matte +map pic*.jpg -loop 99 movie_old.gif"
However there are tons of tools out there specific for this job, online or offline, for Windows, Mac, iPad, Android and you don't have to open a command line for them.
So like with your camera, if you have a favourite image manipulation program, just check if it has this already on board, otherwise do a google search specific to your platform and choose whatever seems convenient to you.
So I really would be delighted to see some more watches, especially modern Seamasters and Speedmasters 🍿.

This is great! What really sticks out to me is just how bad the lume is on the ST, despite having so much of it. I say this as an unabashed fan of the ST1, it is one of my all time favorite Speedmasters. The Black Bay's lume is impressive.

Pretty awesome time lapse. Thanks for sharing! 👍

For me... I see no chance to win this Lumebattle 👍
Awesome job and quality! Thank you for sharing the videos and instructions! What a shame that there is no Damasko in your collection. Would love to see... 😁
Dirk

This is the coolest thing I have seen in a while, great idea! Seems Omega is holding the torch (no pun intended) currently. Maybe a PAM could give it a run for its money?

ST1 has other qualities 😎. So has the Type XXI 😉. Not every watch needs to glow like a torch. But having some is also fun 😁.

I found most astonishing that the subdials ST1 fade so quickly. Colorwise they are the same, that means it should be the same type of lume. The coating is also quite thick, so they probably used less luminous compound in the filler. I wonder if this has something todo with the "challenges" rumoured. Mine is one of the last ones delivered. I have always been curious if this was different compared to the ones delivered at the beginning.

As for the black bay - the filled hour markers are so bright that IMHO the readability does not hold up the the intensity. But I wanted to comment on the percieved readability vs what the GIFs showed in terms of luminousity after my final session.

😁 Let's wait for the mail tomorrow. But rumours are that it is more mediocre. I will find out for you, Dirk 😉.

Unfortuneately I have none at hands, yet. I would also be interested in some Rolex sporties 😗. Maybe someone else has a go 🙄.

Yes, see if the Crown can take the crown.

Dueling Benarus Moray Dart dials

Speaking of lum, a cool edition of "lifetime" dedicated to the olympics in London 2012 😉