Luxury Watch Photography

Background

Perpetual Time provide high quality luxury watch repair, watch servicing and watch restoration services. They are fully qualified WOSTEP (Watchmaker of Switzerland Training Education Program) and have studied with BHI (British Horological Institute), assuring each customer’s timepiece is in safe hands and receives the highest standard of service.

The client needed a new website, which would showcase their work and make it easy for customers to find and contact them, complete with new photography.

Challenges

The biggest challenge with producing the luxury watch photography for Perpetual Time’s new website was capturing and communicating the immense detail and precision involved in dismantling and repairing these high-value timepieces.

Each watch has minute and intricate details that define its style and brand. These needed to be captured and emphasised to show the character of each individual watch.

The photographs were to be used on the new website, which we were also designing – the overall style had to be that comparable to Rolex and Cartier, as it would be featuring their brand names and products.

We also needed a way to showcase the restoration and repair work that takes place, photographing the slightly damaged or well-used ‘before’ watch, and then the brand new looking restored ‘after’ watch. We then put these two photographs side by side to show the transformational process.

Solution

To really showcase the craftsmanship and beauty of the work, we took a series of macro photography shots of Perpetual Time at work in their bespoke workshop. A lot of watch manufacturers use 3D rendered images to show off their watches, as it’s easier to pose them and to control the lighting to properly accentuate the features, we didn’t want to do this as we didn’t feel it was a true representation of the real-life beauty in these watches.

The lighting was key in making these shots as captivating as possible; not only does macro photography require a shedload of light to expose properly, but the lighting also needed to hit and bounce off certain features to make them more pronounced. With macro photography, the focal plane becomes very narrow, making it impossible to get the whole object in focus. To overcome this, we used a technique called focus stacking. In some cases, a ‘single’ watch photograph was taken using a combined 25 photographs, each focused on a different part of the watch, which were then combined in Photoshop.