Behind the catalogue

The case for the crop

Why every watch in this catalogue is photographed against nothing at all.

The Dials desk · 2 min read

Product photography is a negotiation between the watch and its background. Studio shots from a dozen sources arrive with a dozen different greys behind them, and lined up in a grid the effect is a patchwork — your eye reads the backgrounds before it reads the watches.

Breitling B55 Connected, as the source photographed it Omega Speedmaster '57, cut out
Before and after: an original studio shot next to a cut-out. Lined up in a grid, only the second kind compares cleanly.

So we remove them. Every image in the catalogue is cut out and squared off, which means a Speedmaster and a Datejust sit on the same ground and can actually be compared.

What it costs

It is slower than it sounds, and it fails in interesting ways:

  1. Polished bracelets reflect their surroundings, and a mirror-finished link can take part of the old background with it.
  2. White dials against a white sweep have no edge to find.
  3. Anything transparent — a sapphire case back, a skeleton dial — has no single right answer.

A cut-out is a claim about where the watch ends. Most of the time that is obvious. The interesting failures are the times it is not.

IWC Pallweber pocket watch
A gold pocket watch against a white sweep — the edge the cut-out has to find runs straight through a highlight.

What we keep

The original stays. A crop is stored alongside the picture it came from, never in place of it, so a bad cut-out is always one column away from being redone — and a reviewer can see both when deciding which image leads.