Watches in different light

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Hey guys, bit of a random post here, but I wanted to know if I'm the only one that experiences this, or if everyone does!

For a while I've known that the get the best photographs of my watches, it is best not to shoot them either in artificial light, or in direct sunlight. My happy medium is usually on a cloudy day when the light is less intense, and more ambient, or at the golden hour, when beautiful oranges light can make them glow.

However, this is not always the conditions we face when we actually wear our watches. We might be outside, we might be inside, it might be early in the morning, the afternoon, dusk or the evening and as such our beautiful watches appear to transform - and sometimes into not so pretty versions of themselves.

Often I have sat in an artificial lit room, with my box of watches and thought to myself, you know I think I'll sell this one and then in the morning I fall in love again with it, and cannot let it go. With this in mind, I never make rash decisions!

But still it does leave me with a conundrum, and one that I'll ask you how you deal with this. If for example you're going out for a meal in the evening, and it's almost certainly going to be artificially lit, do you choose your watch with lighting in mind? I sometime find that the watch that I'd love to wear, might not always look as nice as it did during the day when I intend to wear it, and so I choose something else for example a black dialed watch.

I don't know, maybe i'm picky - or it's just my choice of light bulbs, but I wanted to see if other people have experienced this?

Look forward to hearing from you,

Ollie 😀
 
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Different conditions change the way a dial will reflect the light, but I only care about it when I'm staring at an overexposed or dimly-lit photograph on eBay and wondering if that's just a scratch on the crystal or a gouge on the dial itself. 😒
 
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I don't even think about it when picking what to wear. I do have several watches that look very different in the outdoor sunlight vs indoor lighting, but they look good either way.

My Titanium Planet Oceans will look dark blue or even black indoors, but take on a crayon blue color in the sunlight, or in between with less than sunlight. And my Rolex Hulk can be a bright crayon green outdoors, but dark green or even black indoors (or at least the sunburst dial will look black indoors). I like them both ways.

Black Dial


Green Sunburst Dial, same watch


Matt Crayon Green look
 
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I like all the different ways it can look in different lighting.

Ti Planet Ocean under a flashlight or direct sunlight = lighter blue.


More subdued blue without intense light outdoors.


Now, almost black, same watch, same dial, indoors.
 
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I haven't considered that i should think about the evening light wes hen considering my watch choice. You are not crazy. You are prescient.