5:07 pm

Leica CL + Zeiss Jena 24mm f2.8 Macro

Watches are notoriously difficult to photograph. While well aware of that fact, I never had occasion to experience this difficulty myself - until I tried to photograph mine today. I was photographing something else in the garden, when I noticed how the apple blossoms after the rain complemented the delicate rose-gold colour scheme of my 1952 Jaeger LeCoultre, with its apple-green strap that took me ages to find. So I took off my watch, hung it {carefully} over a branch, and tried to take a portrait. Of course, the problem was the reflective surface of the crystal. Initially I tried to angle the watch so as to eliminate the reflectiveness. However, this proved trickier than expected - and even when I did minimise the effect I wasn’t happy with the images. So instead, I started to look for ways to incorporate the reflective nature of the crystal into the composition. The result is very far from an expert watch photo, but I am pleased with it. The manner in which the silhouette of the blossoms is echoed in the reflection makes them feel frozen in time, captured, eternally preserved. The ‘time stamp,’ so to speak, also somehow feels meaningful… 5:07 pm on an early May afternoon.