Excellent. Gratuitous spending on unnecessary camera gear always gets a thumb up from me. I'm a specialist in self justification and spouse fooling, and camera stuff is both very easy to sneak into the house and easy to justify (look how lovely you/your mum/the cat looks in this photo now I've got this new lens etc).

I'm surprised though CF. Given your general awareness of "stuff" and analytical mind I thought you'd have got to grips with aperture, light and depth of field some time ago. Interesting subject to play around with once you understand the fundamentals, and it it'll transform your approach to picture composition.

Time to suck up to Uncle Cyberface too. Does he have kids? If not then I'd line yourself up to inherit the Hasselblads.

One for another thread perhaps, but I'd disagree with this, as will you once you play around. For landscape you can do a huge amount with depth of field - and the results from shooting wide open can be as pleasing as they are different from closing down as much as possible to give a DOF from your nose to the horizon. Play around next time you're out, and you'll see what I mean.

Pics are good, but they make me feel a bit inebriated with that tilt-shift look. I'd narrow down a little so that the depth of field extends to make the foreground in focus just a little more. The strong bokeh behind to bring out the detail of the movement is pretty bloody good for an inebriated first go though .

Are you sure you haven't just been fiddling with tiltshift?

ETA: Oops - mentioned already. Here's a linky to a DIY tiltshift site: click.

I have the lumix g1, a nice camera but the range of lenses is limiting. AFAIK there's just the two available, which I have. Also not so good in low light conditions.

I'm on a pretty tight budget at the moment, so sadly can't afford a macro lens or fancy lights, but this is the sort of thing I'll typically get:

(Nikon D50 with the Lens that came with it when new, cheap set of macro tubes, florescent desk lamp and wobbly mini tripod, on timer)

One problem I consistently have is my images looking too cold. Not sure if this is a white balance issue or if it can't be avoided with a lamp of my type, but the following is after I de-saturated the blue hues in Gimp:


You can see that even at this not particularly close range I have DoF issues, with the dial being clear, but the scratches on the case being ill-defined.

The following are of a Smiths stopwatch I'm working on at the moment. I don't know who "serviced" it before, but it stands as a fine example of why the Squirt of WD-40 Method isn't to be reccomended. At least it wasn't in danger of rusting!

Crud sticking to everything= shorter life for the watch. Ironically, due to oil being everywhere, capilliary action actually draws oil away from the places where it really needs to be and increases wear.


And here we see it sticking the coils of the hairspring together. This stopwatch was counting a minute in under 36 seconds (!), and required a shake to get it going, since the coils had pulled the balance so far out of beat.

But again- though these shots are great for documenting what I'm looking at- they're too cold looking for, say, a sales image. Could this be fixed with a simple lamp swap? Or should I just get better at image editing?

Im the op their is mention of a app for iphone 4 that is better than the standard camera app so, any app recommendations?

Backgrounds....no one's mentioned them yet.

Eg. Diving watch - something diving related in the background, strapped around diving equipment or place the watch on an old map.
chrono - old car brochure/magazine cover.
ladies dress watch - beside other jewelry.

Diamond encrusted Daytona - on a (slightly out of focus) pile of cash.

This guy takes really cool pics

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hypophyse/

The second one is brilliant! One of those "Damn, why didn't I think of it?! "

It's not about the execution, I know I could take a similar one. It's about the idea. I don't like being a copycat