Has Photography Changed How I Collect? I Checked.

Another one from the Instagram question box. @thatdavidmerlin asked: how has photography influenced the way you think about and collect watches?

It's a fair assumption. I post nearly every day. I rebuilt my photo studio this year. My collecting thesis is pieces that reward close inspection, which sounds suspiciously like a photographic criterion. You'd expect the camera to be steering the collection by now.

So here's the honest answer: I have yet to see watch photography impact my collecting. And I don't have to guess about that, because I checked.

I ran the data

A few months back I analyzed every post from my first year on Instagram. All 348 of them. Engagement metrics from the Graph API, every image through a vision model, reference specs for every unique piece. I published the full findings in April, and if you haven't read that post, it's here.

The short version: my audience saves Zeniths at three times my baseline. They reward field watches over dress watches. They engage with character and color more than heritage or tier. Studio Underd0g, a playful British microbrand, is my top-performing brand by engagement rate.

Here's the test. If photography and Instagram were driving my collecting, I'd be optimizing toward what that analysis told me. More field watches. More color. More microbrands with a strong visual identity.

I haven't. I buy watches for me, not for what photographs well.

The proof is what I'm buying in 2026

This is the part that may sound counterintuitive: my collection is actually moving toward territory where the Instagram audience is less receptive.

I've been buying fewer microbrands in 2026. Microbrands historically do really well on Instagram. They're usually differentiated by design, and the algorithm rewards that differentiation. Two watches I've posted recently fit this bill perfectly: the Behrens NaviGraph and the Kollokium Cooler Waters. Both did well with the algorithm. The Behrens is also one of exactly three watches in my collection that qualifies as a genuine conversation piece, which I wrote about earlier in this series.

So the data says microbrands are what my feed rewards, and my buying is drifting away from them anyway. If that's influence, it's running in reverse.

I don't let social media influence my purchases. The April analysis gave me a dashboard of my own taste and my audience's taste, and the overlap turned out to be high. But overlap is not causation. I bought those watches because I wanted them. The engagement was a nice coincidence.

What about the camera itself?

The other version of this question is whether the act of shooting changes what I'll own. Some watches are genuinely hard to photograph. Sapphire that catches every light source in the room. Case materials that show every reflection. Dial materials that read completely differently on camera than in the metal.

None of that holds me back. It may frustrate me in the moment, mid-studio-session, chasing a reflection I can't kill. But it has never precluded me from buying a watch. A difficult subject is a photography problem, not a collecting problem, and I keep those ledgers separate.

There's also a practical reason I couldn't buy for photographability even if I wanted to: I'm not at a point where I reliably know what will photograph well. I just completely rebuilt my photo studio, and I'm re-learning everything I knew about watch photography. The new lighting has a much steeper learning curve. It also has a much higher ceiling. Ask me in a year whether I can predict a good subject. Right now, I can't.

Where the influence actually runs

So if photography hasn't changed what I buy, has it changed how I think about watches?

Some, but not in the direction people expect. The influence isn't aesthetic, it's analytical. Photographing my collection every day is what generated the dataset. The dataset is what let me measure my own taste honestly, and measuring it confirmed that the taste was already there before the camera showed up. Photography didn't shape the collection. It documented the collection, and the documentation taught me something about the audience that formed around it.