Taking pictures and reflections of the crystal

Do you ever wonder why you hardly see any reflections when looking at your watch and when you take a picture of it in exactly the same position, all you see are reflections?

Yesterday, I realized why this happens. We look with both our eyes and our brain forms the picture we see. For our mind, we look straight at the watch but because of the distance between the eyes, we actually look at it in an angle!
To confirm this, close one eye and look straight at your watch, just like your camera with one objective. You will see all the reflections you recognize from your bad pictures!

This makes me wonder, is there anybody with a stereo camera? I really wonder if this will also help in getting rid of the reflections of the crystal.

Kind regards,

Clemens

PS: maybe you already knew this but it's also possible that this info is useful to some of you

A very reflective picture...

Flat crystals suffer more from these reflections as can be seen in this example.

Kind regards,

Clemens

Thank You Cing...Nice Work (nt)

Polarizing Lens Filter...

Cing,
Years ago when I did a lot of 35mm photography I used a lot
of filters. If your lens excepts filters a polarizing filter will eliminate glare and reflections. They work really well around water, glass and I bet watch crystals too. I'll have to find out if my digital lens
accepts filters and give it a try.
Great Post

                                                                                   Joe

Nice experiment!

Lighting issues...

When I was playing around last week and cut together my little movie of my portuguese chrono I really had no energy to work on lighting. So, instead of the ambient lighting I would have preferred, all of the lighting for the pictures was my wall-mounted halogen reading lamp. It was also very sunny outside, which made things even worse.

My camera has a tendency to produce a lot of iso noise when photographing in darker conditions, and especially so when capturing video as it can't adjust the shutter speed. That meant that I had to light the portuguese somehow, or the end result would have been painfully grainy video (that I could have removed with a video filter, had apple not replaced iMovie '07 with the ghastly p.o.c. that is iMovie '08).

The best way to have handled it would have been to set up some ambient light with no clear source. As I just wanted to play around, I didn't want to spend a day doing that.

What I did to alleviate reflections and at the same time cope with smaller amount of noise was this:
1 - Make sure the reflection is from something in a dark color tone. I shot the whole thing in the corner of my dark gray couch, angling the watch in such a way that any reflected image would be from a homogenous dark surface. That worked really well for some of the stills.
2 - When I edited the video in iMovie, I noticed that the video clips I had shot still were too grainy. I remedied this by lowering the contrast as well as the brightness of the clips and then did the same for the stills I used in the movie. If there is a subtle low brightness and contrast set across all elements of a sequence, it is hardly noticable. If I had only done it for the video clips, the difference would have caused the video to appear a lot worse in comparison to the stills (which would have been an accurate distinction).

I know the crystal is coated with an anti-reflective element, imagine how difficult it would have been if it weren't...

/Jan

(I'm posting the link to the video again, only to demonstrate what I just said.)

The video, on youtube.

i simply love your pics

but i've already told you ;)

thanks anyway and again.

roberto

Thanks, very useful info!

I will try if I can use your tips next time, thanks very much!

Kind regards,

Clemens