In this
composition you have a wonderful capture of the watch face, the the logo is also well complimented. It seems a bit unusual to have both the silver and gold accessories, but if they were both visible, it may not be too bad of a set. The cufflinks, as you say are underexposed, and the golden thingies are overexposed, and the chrome corner of the paper holder is a bit out of focus or overexposed as well. The leather has some good textural moments. Natural sunlight should do it for you, if you have an alternate light source for the other direction. It looks like it is receiving back lighting from the sun. but the eye wants the foreground elements in focus which in this case are the watch strap hole, and the gold patterned thingie. What are the gold thingies anyways, they are too small for letter openers, not backed with a clip to be a tie bar, are they bookmarks?
Here is a
DIY light box which you could set up with one light, and let your sunlight enter one side. For
composition set up, just like with landscapes, it is good to figure out what the eye is drawn to as in the
rule of thirds the
golden ruler, and what is located in the foreground, background and middle ground. Another way to see where the photograph viewer's eyes will go is to open your image temporarily in this
On line golden mean tester.
You have a strong diagonal line in the watch taking the eye from its natural left to right viewing, and letting it go into the photograph, and then you have the paper holder bringing the eye back around again. The W logo emblem helps to ground the middle ground. If it was me, I would loose the golden thingies, unless they are important or use them as repetitive lines to draw the eye to something. Maybe space out the watch away from the logo a bit, to give the cuff links some more room so they are not so crowded.
On talking about this, I think, a crop may be possible, but not 3:2, 4:3 nor 16:9 rectangular format, but rather a square format. It keeps both the negative space equal to the postive space of bright and dark objects, such as you would see on a
histogram or if you made an inverted or "negative" of this photograph (which is really a different effect again, with the white rather than the black) Anyways I digress. This square crop keeps all the items equally clustered together, or
a degree of balance
I hope you don't mind me showing my experiment. I masked out the faces of the cuff links, used levels and contrast/brightness to bring out the pattern, then reduced the saturation to black and white to eliminate the colour, and make them look like brushed silver or silver. I used clone stamping to eliminate the golden thingies. Then I rotated the entire image a bit, played with the crop tool a long time, found the square, which seemed to work a bit better letting the watch and cuff links encircle the W at approximately the same negative space betwixt all of them. Then I enhanced the circle with a vignette.
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