What I said above applies to photos of watches which are for sale. I have had a different take on watches which are for display or illustration only. However, I have always had a slight doubt about this. Let me explain with a specific instance. A few years ago I was asked to take photos of some rare and beautiful Hamilton pocket watches for an educational/fund raising project. The watches for the poster were in great part from 2 of the premier collections in the US. Half of the watches showed up at my house in the briefcase of one of the collectors and half showed up in a cardboard box by registered mail. To the present owners, none of these watches will ever be for sale. These watches include the first Hamilton watch to leave the factory (SN 003) and other rare, scarce and beautiful Hamiltons. I set up the lights and the collector and I set up an assembly line to shoot the movements and dials. We needed to shoot all of the pictures at the same angle to accommodate the poster layout. To do this we had to take all of the movements, especially the hunters out of their cases.

What became readily apparent was that these rare 110 year old watches had some condition issues and, in general were dirty. Some of the movements were so dirty that I had to take the balance cocks off and gently wipe down the movements to get rid of years of accumulated surface dirt but there was no way to get rid of all of the dirt the camera would see. Furthermore some of the watches, being over 100 years old had some scratches and fading.

To make a long story short, we shot all of the watches and dials with the same setup and the same camera angle. The result was a range from some beautiful pictures with minor flaws to pictures with exaggerated flaws. For the next few days I worked in PhotoShop to make all of the watches look as perfect/new as possible. I cloned, healed, leveled and did a lot of complicated things to "restore" these watches to as close to their factory look as possible. I got rid of scratches and dirt and restored the original color and luster as best I could. The result was beautiful if I do say so myself.

Now, here is the moral dilemma I have wrestled with. While these watches may never be for sale during the lifetimes of the collectors who own them, I doubt they will all go to museums after these collectors are gone. In fact, at least one of the lesser watches on the poster has already sold at auction. The photos on the poster are sort of just art and eye candy but they are part of the permanent record of the actual watches.

What do you think?

JohnCote