Every human is creative. Most just haven't found the outlet yet. For me, from a young age, it was photography.
I remember finding my father's Nikkor camera as a kid. He carried it through his time in the South African Army, and it came with him to the USA. I had no idea what an aperture was. I just knew that camera had been somewhere, and that felt important.
I took photography in grade school. Shot sports for the school newspaper. Photographed concerts I was attending, mostly badly, always happily. Never considered myself good at it. I just liked being behind the lens.
Then, like most people, I stopped. High school ended and the camera went into a drawer.
Fast forward to getting married and having my first child. I bought a Nikon D80 to capture my newborn son. That lasted a few months, because camera phones were emerging right around then and they were just so much easier. Why lug around a DSLR when the thing in your pocket does most of the job with none of the friction? So the D80 went the way of the Nikkor.
Roughly eighteen years later, I bought a Sony a6700. That's been my main camera ever since.
A lot of you have asked about my setup, my journey, my equipment. So here it is. One caveat first: I am not a professional. I have a limited idea of what I'm doing, and no idea whether this is the "right" way to shoot a watch. It's become the right way for me though, and it's evolved a lot. Less about the camera. More about lighting and the studio itself.
Photography by @midlifecrisiswatches · © 2026 · All rights reserved
Three chapters
I think about my watch photography in three chapters. You can see all of them on the MidlifeCrisisWatches Instagram.
Chapter One was shooting on-wrist with my iPhone and a phone stand.
Chapter Two was shooting exclusively in a lightbox, getting comfortable working in a small, controlled space.
Chapter Three, which I've just stepped into, is a full studio setup: multiple lights, different tripod and camera positions (side, overhead), and still a lightbox in the rotation when the shot calls for it.
Chapter Three has been the steepest learning curve by far, and the reason is almost counterintuitive. Inside a lightbox, it's genuinely hard to get a bad shot. The lighting is doing most of the work for you. Once you're setting up your own key lights, diffusion, surfaces, and backdrops, it becomes really, really easy to get something wrong. The floor is much higher.
But so is the ceiling. There are things I can do now that were simply not possible with a lightbox alone, and some of the recent photos reflect that.
All three chapters still live on the feed, not just the current one. My earliest posts are straight iPhone shots, on-wrist, no rig at all. I'm not going back and scrubbing those. They're part of the record.
Building the studio
The path from lightbox to studio didn't happen overnight, and it didn't happen in a straight line either.
It started with a basic tabletop lightbox setup, the kind you'd find recommended in any beginner photography forum. That got me comfortable with the fundamentals: exposure, product angles, the discipline of a repeatable setup.
The camera came next. I traded up from an older Sony body to the a6700. My workhorse lens is the Sony FE 90mm f/2.8 Macro, since watches live in the details and a lens that can't resolve those details is the wrong lens no matter how good the body is. But it's not the only lens in rotation. I also shoot with a 56mm prime and the 16-50mm kit lens, depending on what the shot needs. The macro comes out for dial texture and case finishing. The 56mm gets used more for wider product shots and anything with a bit of environmental context. The 16-50mm is the utility lens, the one that covers whatever the other two don't.
For a while, the kit was simple: camera, lenses, lightbox. It did the job. Then I started wanting more control over light direction, more separation between subject and background, and the ability to shoot at angles a lightbox just doesn't allow.
So the studio started coming together, piece by piece, as each limitation showed up. First was a Manfrotto Befree travel tripod, for stability outside the lightbox. Then a real lighting kit built around amaran: a COB monolight and a Verge Max panel, run off an Impact C-stand with flags to control spill. For diffusion I lean on Lee216 sheet, which does a lot of the work in softening a key light without killing the contrast entirely. For surfaces and backgrounds, I've become a big fan of Replica Surfaces. Their material actually looks like what it's imitating instead of looking like a prop, which matters more than you'd think when the whole point is making a watch look real.
A lot of the connective tissue, arms, clamps, mounts, comes from SmallRig. It's not glamorous gear and nobody asks about it, but it's the stuff that actually holds a shot together while you're fiddling with everything else. For precision positioning I switched to a Really Right Stuff ball head and clamp system, which is a different category of solid compared to the stock heads I started with. And most recently, a Kaiser copy stand, which sounds like a small thing until you realize how much it changes what's possible for overhead product shots.
Every piece got added because the previous setup hit a wall. None of it came from a shopping list. It came from running into a specific problem and going and fixing it.
I only really stepped into Chapter Three in late July of this year, and if I'm honest, I've only started feeling comfortable with it in the past week. This is very much still in progress.
The editing workflow
The majority of my editing happens in Adobe Lightroom. I recently added Lightroom Classic specifically so I could tether my a6700 while shooting, which I only started doing in the past few weeks. It changes the entire rhythm of a shoot when you can see the full-resolution image on a screen instead of squinting at the camera's LCD.
I also picked up Helicon Focus for focus stacking. So far I've only published one focus-stacked image: the Ming x JN Shapiro Lightning. One picture in, and it's already clear this is a technique I'll be leaning on more.
People worth crediting
None of this happened in a vacuum. A huge shoutout to the watch photography community led by @talkingabouttime, and specifically to Morgan Saignes, who has quietly influenced my approach for a while now without either of us really talking about it directly other than exchanging a few DMs. That's how good influences tend to work.
I've also logged a lot of treadmill hours watching YouTube tutorials, and That Icelandic Guy has been the single most useful channel for me, particularly on the Lightroom side.
More to come as Chapter Three keeps unfolding. If you've got questions about any specific piece of the setup, ask away. I'm still figuring plenty of it out myself.