Weekly Photography Thread - Check out last weeks finalists and see the new theme for this week!

Looking fresh 😍😍

Thank You @Deeperblue for asking me to be this week’s guest judge. It’s always a pleasure to see everyone’s watch photos, so to judge is both daunting and an honour. This week’s theme will be ‘Duo”. I look forward to your interpretations of that. 

It can be quite daunting for people submit their pictures into things like this, so as a little bonus, for this week - I’ll be available to critique any photos that you would like feedback on. Now, I’m not suggesting for a minute, that I’m any kind of authority on photography and I’ve always maintained that the only opinion that truly matters on any photo, is that of it’s author. During my time as part of a photography club, we had external judges who would visit and pick out winners for various competitions. We would get a score and a critique. The score itself, was just a number/ranking in relation to the other photographs in the competition - pretty meaningless but the critique was invaluable - it offered insights and advice into things we may have missed or not even considered. It really allowed us to ‘improve’ quite dramatically. Of course, not all advice given, is useful/relevant, so I’ll leave it up to you whether you accept it or not.

We can do this in two ways:
1. Privately: DM me your photo and I’ll make a set of notes in my reply
2. In the comments. I think this would be most useful as it may also help others. Just mark the photo ‘For critique’. Please remember that only constructive criticism is offered and any advice offered is only my opinion and is not actually fact.

In the interests of competition, any photograph submitted for critique will not be considered as an entry for this week’s theme. 
I look forward to seeing the shots!

Noice. 

Hmmm... I might join in on this one…also can we only submit one photo or as many as we can?!

Poppy and me are a duo. Wearing my slimline Seahunter from Geckota in this pic.

A bit route one but I believe they qualify.

It is incredibly kind of you to offer to do this 🙏

I will get to thinking about a photo 👍

Me too this week! 

I'm not very imaginative though 🤦

Old photo

Ok my first submission…

also old photo 

Here’s a pre-existing shot that fits the brief — my watch and my wife’s watch first and foremost, but also both Japan made Solar watches. For contrast, they are competitor brands, one is gold, one is steel, one is dress, one is diver, leather band to steel bracelet also. Masculine and feminine too, in a strictly design sense, though there is something of a Yin Yang thing there, as both are of course unisex — and the diver/chrono dimensions are smaller than usual, as much as the tank was originally a ’male’ design. 
Now I must see what else I can rustle up.

(Though there’s two versions of this shot, because having taken one in the evening for fun and photography, I took the shot again the next day for WRUW. The dust build up is impressive between the two.)

Too on the nose 🤣?
 

@whitesalmon Man, your shot with the waterfalls is fantastic! 🥳🎯💯

And some of my paired Paganis — need to think of some more arty shots rather than looking for catalogue style I think, and also consider the other meanings of duo. Doesn’t necessarily have to be two watches after all…

At least this way I got half a dozen or so shots done this week, instead of accidentally forgetting it again though. 
 

(Edit: Sorry about the thumbprints in shot two. As ever I am working with my iphone and household goods as backgrounds. Usually stationery related if anyone is wondering lol.) 

If it’s ok to chime in, there’s a lot you can do after-the-fact (because sometimes you just can’t retake a photo or set up again) like @Chunghauphoto says. I put your existing image through first the built in Apple photos app. It has a built in ‘auto’ setting that will do a lot, and you can pull that to get a darker (low exposure) image as well, or lighter (high exposure) image. Rotating it slightly and cropping means you can make use of the shapes already in your image, use negative space (the shapes made by having little or nothing in them) and put those watches more in line with the thirds/grid just like he says. It also has some basic filter options, which can be great for more polished looks. I also added a vignette, but rather than a traditional darkening of the corners, instead I went lighter, pushing the exposure up to bring the light wood up against the darks in the centre. 
 

@Chunghauphoto also mentions Snapseed, which is free imaging editing software from Google, which has a plethora of nice effects, including vintage film-camera looks, healing (for getting rid of dust in my many cases…) and my personal favourite of adding a frame. It’s much less smelly and faster than hanging out in a darkroom.

Black and white of course is instant arty, but not always. 

Between those you can do stuff even after the initial image has been taken, you can see some of the things I mentioned here — a lot is a matter of taste, and down to a persons eye, judgement and style. And of course intent.

I used a neutral grey in PhotoCollage to show the differences, but you could actually collage a slice of different versions together, presenting it as one image at that point, which again would change up the compositions. 
It would work particularly well because of the way you chose repeating round shapes and different kinds of reflective surfaces, and also got in some contrast with the straight straws and the natural material of the wood working inwards through increasingly man-made objects. 

I’m not against post-processing in anyway but I will just add: that getting it right ‘in camera’ and spending a few moments to set up your shot or reviewing what you have just taken is the most preferable course of action. As you say, sometimes you can’t ‘go back and take the shot again’ unfortunately

Yup.

The fact I am always in a rush (and some memories of films being chewed) is probably why I am quite often big on post-processed and sometimes heavily stylised images. I used the HUJI app for some photos, because it intentionally replicates the chaos I used to get from film cameras, shooting in cafes and whatnot as a student. (I used to use a Lomo coloursplash as well — never knew quite what would come out of that thing) Partially that’s also because of the photographers I liked the work of back in the day — Hiromix, Daido Moriyama, and Araki being the big three for me back then. My photography kind of waned as digital put quality out of my reach, and dated my tools, until phone cameras caught up. (There’s a longer story involving whatever the word for a phobia of photographic darkrooms would be too lol.)

I basically had to learn to be a bit slapdash in a way, which is awkward, because I would much prefer the more controlled in-camera approach to hoping for happy accidents — I’m not much into street photography for instance. Somewhere in the middle between the controlled artifice of studio, and the spontaneous but chaotic nature of guerilla stuff. 

Duo Straps 

🔩 & ⛰️

Any emoji that could represent Explorer?

I have no idea hehe... 

Ultimate 2-watch collection? Change my mind... ✌️🤓

Seiko Duo

Was just packing up my old gear again, and came back to thinking about this. 
We are kind of forced by digital — mainly phone photography — into post processing a lot more than we used to. What I used to do by picking a film stock — Kodak Gold for warmth, or the green/blue/teal of Fuji (mainly in the chemical processing afterwards) or by sticking Cokin filters and the like on my lenses, is now all done after-the-fact. Sure I have a lense kit, but what’s the point in using a starburst? It looks even cheesier now it can be done with software afterwards. 
On the plus side, you don’t have to run two bodies, one with some Ilford, or Kodachrome and one with your Fuji or Kodak, or what have you. Medium Format seems almost more like a matter of taste rather than buying some huge hunk of Hasselblad. (Just use Panorama on your phone, or stitch some shots together in photoshop) No more stinking chemicals and fiddling in the dark with enlargers for cropping and tinting. 
With modern image stabilisation, you barely even need a tripod anymore. And grain and film speed are all choices — often after the fact — rather than something defined by shooting conditions, for the most part.

All digital is now a bit more of an AI processed lie now anyway, especially the newer night modes, and various colour options. The difference is now we choose less in advance, and any choices we make we can also unmake. Or have two choices at once.

Composition, for the most part is all we have left. (Conveniently ignoring that even that is now as easy as holding your finger on some unwanted element to move or delete these days)

Its a very different game isn’t it? 
 

I wonder if there is a cheap Cokin adapter for my iPhone.

On the whole, digital has made photography ‘better’ imo. The rate at which you can learn is a lot higher today than in ’film days’. You are right, it’s a lot less ‘stinky’ than before (unless you have dirty room/laptop/pc/mobile device to process on, of course) but all the same photography rules still apply and it’s not any easier to get a shot. There’s more leeway in terms technology and it probably costs less to make a mistake in terms of time and money.

Due to the vast number of photos taken, I think there has to more ‘good’ and ‘bad’ photos than in the film era - which, again, is good thing imo because there’s is a bigger sample size to study and learn from.

Can’t just tape the filter onto the phone?? Also I bet someone has already made that adaptor!

I looked, and no dice so far. Doesn’t matter really, can just hold it there. 
 

And yeah I am very pro digital, and always was. The only thing I lament is that the upgrade cost kind of stopped it for me years back, and if I ever wanted the modern equivalent of that Canon T90 of mine, it’s an arm and a leg even if it existed. But then, my FD mount lenses were already superseded by EOS stuff even before digital blossomed —and I suppose it’s not impossible to find an FD/EOS adapter that kind of sort of works.

I became very big on digital very fast in the early 2ks, after swearing off darkrooms (and eventually art school altogether lol) and That was That, except I never got a new camera. Snappy Snaps and burnt on a CD was fine by me, then into the laptop.
A few years back someone was kickstarting a ’digital camera back’ for old SLRs, but every time those projects start, they mysteriously vanish. Partially cos it’s near impossible to decently make such a thing, but also I expect because it would have an impact on current camera sales.

Was just thinking on it.

It’s very much like watches, automatics and quartz, traditional and smart. 

does this count? each being in a backround 

Explorer

Santos

Thanks to this post I started to get more creative in taking pics 👐

Dynamic Duo!  Japanese and Canadian, with Japanese watches, living in Canada!

Duo of German manual wind watches. Fronts and backs of my Nomos Orion and Stowa Partitio.

For official submission. I posted these earlier this week for critique purposes but I didn’t see any criticism so they must be pretty good 😜