Paul Gavin is one of our regular contributors to OnTheDash, and most of us consider Paul to be our very best photographer. Paul displays his beautiful photographs on his website HeuerWorld.com, and you can read more about Paul over there.
Recently, during a rainy weekend in the south of England, Paul spent some time producing some “art photos”, different in style from his usual more realistic photos. Paul posted links to these photos in a message on our discussion forum, and he has given us permission to give these art photos a more permanent home here. Accordingly, this page shows the six art photos that Paul posted on our forum (five Heuers and one Zenith), as well as two other photos that I especially admire (both manual-wind Carreras).
In another message on our forum, Paul explained the creative process:
These are actual pictures of my watches. Let me explain this using cooking as an analogy. The raw ingredients are a nice picture of a watch plus either one or more other images mixed and blended together in Photoshop to produce the final offering. There is no recipe and just like in cooking, you taste as you go along but in my case its my visual perception and preconceived idea that determines if it needs some more or less of this or that until I think it meets my expectation. Even though I may use the same ingredients and repeat the process it will never be the same as I do not save anything until I am happy with the end result. It may take up to 10, 20, 50 or more steps to produce an image and I don’t record these so it’s a spontaneous process. Photoshop is an amazing tool but like any media you need to (a) know how it works and (b) have a good idea of what you want to create in order to achieve some degree of success.
Special thanks to Paul for allowing us to show these great photographs, and for all his other contributions to our community.
Heuer Autavia, Reference 3646, first execution screw-back case (circa 1962)
Heuer Autavia GMT, Reference 1163GMT, early execution (circa 1970)
Heuer Autavia, Reference 1163T ("Siffert"), early execution (circa 1970)
Heuer Silverstone, Reference 110.313R (red) (circa 1974)
Heuer Autavia Diver 100, Reference 11063P (decompression bezel) (circa 1984)
Zenith El Primero, Reference A386 (tri-color) (circa 1970)
Heuer Carrera, Reference 2447SN (circa 1970)
Heuer Carrera 45 Dato, Reference 3147N (circa 1968)