Pugwash

Introduction Thanks to Edge for asking me to collaborate on a software how-to instead of my usual camera setup stuff. He went and did a marvellous piece on how to use Adobe Potatoshop or whatever it's called, which can require some serious beans in your PC and, while we may like replica watches, maybe we're not fans of pirated software. So, can the basics be done on the cheap? Certainly, and I'll show you how. First, let me check my Apple Dual-2GHz G5 PowerMac with 3GB of RAM and about a Terabyte of diskspace and ensure my 24" widescreen LCD is ... oh, wait ... on the cheap. Ok, One sec while I fire up my cheap-ass Windows XP PC with a lot less everything on it. Software There are several bits of software that will enable you to crop, straighten and generally fix your photos. You probably even got one with your camera. I'll save you all the trouble of trying them out to see what's best and tell you straight off: If you're on Windows XP, you'll be needing Picasa. It's free and it does all the basics very, very well. Face it, if it's good enough for Google, it's good enough for us. You can find it here: When you import your pictures from your camera using Picasa, it'll copy them somewhere on your hard-drive and do stuff to make them available, but this stuff is deemed so basic I'll just get on with what to do with them once they're there. Pic a picture and let's go through the basics. First, you can crop or rotate. I'll rotate first, just so I know what to crop to. Rotating is really easy and, as long as you used a high-resolution picture to start with, doesn't cause much visible loss of quality. Once we have the picture aligned as needed, we can crop it down for a good composition. We then take the picture into the colour balancing parts, and try to recreate what we actually saw, or turn up the colours a little in the shadows, but the most important is the temperature slider. If you used an indoor light, you want to go colder (left). Just play with the sliders until you get a good effect, but don't try to go too far from reality. Also, there is the effects section that my screencap software didn't capture properly where I desaturated the colours a little to make the watch stand out from the background. The final result is a lot tidier than the original. This was the starting point To recap, I've got a short sequence of the steps here on a different picture: Before and after: This is another piece fiddled with in Picasa: I'm actually finding it difficult to find anything else to say as this has dealt with every step of getting the pictures from the camera to finished pieces. It really is that simple. I'm feeling like I'm letting you down by not giving you any special pugwash secret super tips this time, but there aren't any. It ... is ... this ... simple. Thanks to Edge once more for inviting me to collaborate with him on this project.

Eek! Don't use the flash!

Thank you for the compliment, too. I've reposted the ubiquitous articles here (linked in my sig for those who can't find them) and am working on part 3 as well as part 2 of your post-processing one.

(This article first appeared on Tea-Are-Sea and is reprinted here by request) So, did you all take a nice pic of your watch lesson one style? Great, because today, I felt inspired by a new trader. He sells lots of Panerais, which don't appeal to me yet - but I'm sure they will one day, and his pics are all a little blurred with the reflection of the camera in the sapphire. So, jjs_swiss_store, this one's for you. The Stock Shot So, instead of the planned composition and lighting and stuff I was going to do, I've decided to show you how to do a simple sell-your-watch stock shot, just like this: Once again, I've got my expensive, flashy camera and lighting kit out and ... used it to take pics of how to do it without the good stuff. Equipment What you'll need for this lesson is a camera, a watch, a table, some printer paper, a table or spot lamp and, er ... um, a pillowcase or similar. Oh, and maybe a few CD cases or similar to sit stuff on. Put a few CD cases on the table, put some paper on top and place the watch in an interesting pose, maybe like the one above, or similar. Don't do it face on to the camera, but use an interesting angle that won't show reflections of the camera on the sapphire. Then, get anything like a book or a mug to curve the paper up behind the watch. This is your basic white background that shows off best the watch. Black can be used if you have it, like a t-shirt or something, but expect a call from Neil's lawyers claiming you're cramping his style. Next, put the lamp next to the still life with watch you've created, turn *off* the flash, set your timer to ten seconds (you may or may not need the camera set to Macro) and press the button! Take a few pictures like that, making positional changes here and there and then take the camera to your computer. Leave the still-life there, as we'll be coming back once we've seen how terrible the pictures are. Firstly, we forgot to clean the watch. Oops, out with the cleaning cloth and polish up that beauty. Secondly, the shadows are harsh, almost was bad as the flash, but they're at funny angles and the light is too strong and ... relax. We've got this covered. What we need is some way to diffuse the light. Something to make it less harsh, like a lampshade, or ... a pillowcase! Excellent, now look at the pictures you took and see what pose works best. Next, move the camera back a bit, creating more white space around the watch, and as before, set the timer and everything. Now, hopefully your timer will give you ten seconds to be a lighting rigger. Click the button, and move over to the lamp and gently put the diffuser (pillowcase, carrier bag, whatever) between the lamp and the watch and wait until the pic is taken. do a few more shots like this, making adjustments as you see fit. Once this is done, upload the pics to your PC and check out the quality. Better, eh? Now, feel free to take shots from different angles like the back or of the crown, if you want to show people all the specifics. However, less is better. Two or three good shots of a watch should be enough to convince anyone of the quality. If you want, you can crop the picture down to a better composition, but we'll go into that in much more detail about that another day. Feel free to post pics of your watches here or in eyecandy to show off your new learned techniques.

(This article first appeared on Tea-Are-Sea and is reprinted here by request) Introduction We've all seem the amazing photos dealers put up (yes, we're looking at you, Neil) to hock their wares and we've seen the eyecandy specials that make us drool inexplicably over yet another Panerai even though it looks just like every other one. We've also seen technical breakdowns with sharp details that truly are worth a thousand words. And then we've all seen the rest. The blurry good-enough-for-ebay pics where you ask yourself if they make an orange Sub or a green PO, because honestly, it could be either. And you sheepishly realise that you took one of those pics and you posted it here and got the mickey surgically extracted for your efforts. Or, you didn't post it because you realised the scorn that would be heaped upon your person if it ever saw the light of day. If this is you, this article was written with you in mind. Everyone wants the quality of pictures to go up here, so I've decided to help people to take better pictures of their watches to increase the average pictures on this board, one reader at a time. I don't pretend to be the best photographer here, but if nothing else, you should be able to learn to take photos at least as good as this: We'll get back to taking this kind of pic in part two, so let's speed through the essentials before we get there. Equipment What do you need? Well, let's start with a digital camera. Oh, and a watch. The question always arises about which camera to get, and the answer is usually the same: It doesn't matter, as long as it's a camera. No, not a phone, a camera. That's better. There are several kinds of cameras, but I'll keep it simple and use three groups: SLR, SLR-like and Snapshot. SLR is the one where you look through a viewfinder and it bounces through a prism and shows you the view through the same optics that the camera uses. It's the big fancy one with changeable lenses and the high price-tag. Common models are the Canon EOS-350 and ... the others. Yes, the Canon is that popular. SLR-Like, or Prosumer, high-end or any of the other titles is the pricey one with a big lens on the front and all the toys. It's not quite as flashy or expensive as the SLR, but it's nearly as good. Models include the Fuji Finepix S9000, the Sony DSC-R1 and the Panasonic DMC-FZ30. Snapshot cameras are the sort everyone has. Designed for carrying around and taking the occasional pic, the lens on the front is much smaller than the SLRs and Prosumers, but hey, at least they take pictures, right? In fact, in the hands of most users, these cameras will take pictures that are just as good as their more expensive brethren. There are too many of these to mention, but we'll assume you have one. Controversially, for the purpose of this article, I'm going to lump the SLRs and Prosumer SLR-alikes in the same group and not even discuss them yet. If you believe you can tell the difference in quality of photograph between those two, this article is not for you. We're talking to the beginners here. You'll get your turn in the comments section. So, let's start on a snapshot camera and take a pic of a watch. No messing straight into it! I'll grab my FinePix A204 snapshot camera and snap away! Yeah, rubbish, isn't it. What went wrong? I pointed the camera at a watch and pressed the button. The flash went off and everything! Where do we start? Firstly, out of focus. Reason? Not enough light for the auto-focus. Second, boring! Reason? No background or anything interesting apart from a watch at a flat angle. If you're determined to just have a picture of a watch and nothing but a watch, you can either do a TTK and use lots of black, or you can go press shot and use white that can be photoshopped out later. Or, you can go for an interesting angle, composition or detail. Third, the shadow is too harsh and the metal too crappy-looking. Reason? Flash. Eww, flash. Horrible things that should be avoided wherever possible unless you really know what you're doing. How this happens is, once again, not enough light. Spotting a pattern here? Yes, light matters, especially with close-ups like this. If you don't have enough light, get some. There's very little you can do in low light levels... or is there? In photography you can trade time for light, so we need to keep that in mind, however we need to remember that slower pictures are also blurry as your hands wobble, and we don't have a fancy tripod just yet. So, what we need to do is cheat. Set up your camera with the flash turned off and on the best resolution possible. If you need to, you may need to turn macro mode on, but let's not do that just yet, as it's a distraction. Next, set the self-timer on the camera to ten seconds, put the camera on the surface close to the watch and make sure it looks ok in the viewfinder. Now, press the button to take the pic and stand well back. In ten seconds, it will take a picture on a slow setting due to the lack of light, but this is ok as it's solid on the desk and won't wobble. And there you have it, one picture to crop to a nice, simple picture of your watch. Sure, it's not perfect, but it's a thousand times better than the last one. In part two, we'll deal with ... um, more stuff like reflections and composition, but you have the basic secrets of how to take an acceptable picture with an average, cheap camera. ps. In case anyone is wondering, the camera I took the picture of the camera with is my regular tool, the amazing Panasonic DMC-FZ20. I used the cheap-ass camera because there's nothing I hate more in articles than the writer saying "it doesn't matter what you use, but I'm going to use something much better than you have and you'll never really know if it's me or my equipment." pps. In the Irony section, I noticed afterwards that the watch glass had a smudge on it, but because I wanted to show you the actual pic taken with the camera pictured, I decided not to take it again. Mea Culpa.

I'd go for this one for sheer function and form: Well, that or the IWC GST in Ti.

You want me to repost the photo tutorials here as well?

If you'll be travelling with the camera a lot, you need to consider weight. A camera you leave in the hotel room because it's too heavy is no use.

Wow, I can't believe how crappy my spelling gets when my GF calls me through for lunch. I lose the plot, spell badly and cut my post short. Still, the food was worth it. For those who couldn't parse my gibberish, I meant "Magic wand tool". Lucky takes fair photos but uses the magic wand to try to remove background blemishes, but sometimes this cuts into the watch, giving a weird effect.

We're waiting on pricing, but it'll not be as horrendous as many believe. My Panasonic DMC-FZ20 has a Leica lens. The totally awesome lens is one of the reasons I bought it. Anyway, what pics do you want to take? Because we can already see there are several dealers each with their distinctive styles of taking watch shots. For instance, Neil (ttk) will sit well back with two lamps and a black background, meaning his focussing is always precise and uniform, even if he has to crush the blacks a little afterwards. He crops heavily and uses only optical zoom, not digital. Eddie Lee, though, will go in real close on f2.8 or possibly lower. He'll manually focus on a detail and let the depth of field give an amazing picture that draws you right into the detail, making you forget to notice that the piece of curved paper behind the watch is creased too tightly. Andrew, Trusty old Andrew, will use autofocus on close-ups, meaning he unfortunately gets amazingly clear reflections, at the cost of a great pic. Luckyyy, however, will get bitten on the ass by the magic want on photoshop so hard I can't tell all his techniques.

The camera doesn't matter that much, to be honest. Buying a new camera won't instantly make you a better photographer. If you're buying a fancy SLR to help you become a better photographer, I'd recommend a cheaper Canon EOS350D with the change from the bigger camera (a D70 is about $300 more than a EOS350) spent on glass. The flexibility of having more choice in lenses will allow you to experiment more, and that's what makes you get better. However, if you're buying a camera for pose-value and cachet, and there's nothing wrong with that, then I'd say Nikon all the way, but if I were buying an SLR, I would wait for this one before deciding: Panasonic DMC-L1. I use the Panasonic DMC-FZ20 non-SLR as my main workhorse, but use a beaten-up old FinePix A204 for my tutorials. (edits for links and stuff...)

For luxury goods, it's 20+% and then there's VAT. Retail on a Rolex is what, $4000-$8000? Check out this if you're in the US: http://hotdocs.usitc.gov/docs/tata/hts/bychapter/0601c91.pdf In Europe, it can be 20-40% plus VAT of up to 20%. It gets really silly.

Wow, how many of these do I have to join now? I think I'll keep it down to these three.

The tax on any imported rolex would not be $200-$300. It would more likely be $2000-$3000.

I'm feeling green.