Seiko (a massive Japanese brand) is well known in the watch community for their affordable, yet durable dive watches; these watches are also well-known for their “lume” — the luminescent paint applied to the hands and indices.
Balancing the exposure needed to get a “lume shot” where the paint is noticeably glowing, without under-exposing the rest of the image is pretty notoriously difficult, and I’d not yet tackled the task. However, with school a recent memory, I decided to attempt it today.
However, I’ve had the idea for a while, to not only do a watch shot, but to find something else that glows, and pair the watch with that in a photo. My Glock 43 is equipped with tritium night sights, and so I carefully placed the watch atop the rear end of the slide, and was able (shooting in Nikon’s .nef RAW file type, of course) to create a subtly light photo with the available ambient light, while also bringing out the glow from both the watch’s luminescent paint, as well as the glow from the much dimmer tritium. And all in one frame — I didn’t use any composite techniques like HDR today.
I thought it was a cool image, and worth sharing the process and product for, but had to choose the right venue, appropriate to share on.
Thanks for your time,
Colin
