# Photographing Tritium Lume watches



## Eeeb

I almost always wear a watch at night and tritium lume watches are my favorite watches for that role. A decent photo to show this lume turns out not to be as easy as it first looks...

Here are the watches we are dealing with --








(Mondane Night Vision Big Date, Marathon Navigator, Smith and Wesson) Note the inability to get everything in focus at once due to the wide aperture necessary at the existing light level.

And a shot made on "automatic" exposure which shows the lume...









Now this is an ok shot... you see a lot of them on WUS in various levels of exposure. It shows lume but in no context. And the watch with the least level of glowing (the Smith and Wesson) barely shows up at all. I wanted better.

It turns out experimenting showed the best pics were produced by using the shutter override setting of the camera exposure control, setting the shutter to 16 seconds (16 sec was the max on my camera), and manually varying light light levels during the 16 seconds. (This by turning on and off lights.)

That technique produced these shots:








(Note the second hand on the Mondane.) This pic shows lume in context.









And this was the shot I wanted!

Similar techniques were used on these dial shots.








The 16 sec exposure in no external light.









16 seconds with some additional external photons.










16 seconds with a lot more external photons -- but mostly this exposure was in the dark.

Experiment with this idea and post some of your pics!


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## cnmark

Eeeb said:


> Experiment with this idea and post some of your pics!


You're welcome... - but instead of varying ambient light I usually use the flash shot into a long exposure. And personally I prefer not too much "environment" to appear, just some of the non-luminous elements of the watch. And it's not necessarily tritium tubes that glow...











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## BenL

Impressive photography, guys. b-)

I'll have to try this sometime.


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## Fabricioab

Thankz for the shots!

Cheers.


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## Stock R

I just tried taking my first watch&lume shots yesterday.










Needs a bit of work as I'm not totally happy with them. I've seen some great photos from other users on this forum.


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## Beau8

Fantastic looking lume shots~Cheers! ;-)


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## WatchBuff0

Here are two different ways of doing lume shots:

#1 - This was done by combining two images in photoshop. I took one to capture the watch details, and another image for the lume. They were then stitched together on the computer:










#2 - Image was created by a long exposure in a completely dark room (approx. 20s exposure time) then a burst of strobe light to expose the scene. By putting the camera on rear sync for the flash (flash triggers at the end of the exposure rather then the front) you capture the second hand at the end of the lume trail - rather than the other way around.


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## waruilewi

cnmark said:


>


I always dug this shot of yours even though I've seen it now pretty often.


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## jackportd

Fantastic shots liked them very much,These shots are the best watches photos i had ever seen,Thanks for sharing.


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