Still Life/Product Portolio: Old England Watches

• Reasoning/Rationale:

I plan to photograph an Old England watch for my still life/product concept. I would like to create an interesting photograph to promote Old England watches which experiments with light reflection. Old England was an iconic watch brand form the 1960s, that had models such as Twiggy and the characters from The Avengers television show promoting their brand. This year the brand has been relaunched.

• References

Below I have included some images from the 1960s and one of the only promotional images from the relaunch of Old England. There are very few images that Old England released and all of these images featured models, which is why I thought it would be interesting to produce a still life image of the watch instead.

I decided to look at some pictures of watches to see what lighting effects were used and what I could do differently when taking mine. I chose these three pictures because I particularly liked the lighting.

I thought that the picture on the left was simple yet effective and the lighting effect used would be easy to replicate with a diffuser. I found the picture in the middle interesting because of the water being splashed up against the dark background. Unfortunately I would not be able to do this with my watch as it is not waterproof. I especially like the picture on the right because of the bokeh and the colours that are in it. I thought that it might be interesting to try and produce a bokeh on the day of shooting.

• Aims and objectives

The target audience for this brief could range from horologists to watch collectors to fans of vintage jewellery. I hope the final image I create will feel different to any of the images that Old England have used in their promotional pictures. On their website shop, the images that are used are similar in style and quite boring, as shown below.

I would like to create an image that makes the watch more interesting to look at than the product images from the Old England website. I feel that because Old England mainly focused on who was modelling their watches, it would be a good idea to focus purely on the watches. I plan to experiment with the long chain that my watch hangs on and see if I can create any interesting patterns. I aim to show the watches in a way that they have not been portrayed before.

This is the watch that I intend to photograph:

• Specialist needs - Equipment, Props, Assistant

For this assignment I will need:

x1 Nikon Macro Lens
x1 reflector
x1 diffuser
x1 Tunston light.

I will be providing:

Nikon D3000
1x watch