I’ve been taking photos of watches for about 3 days now and it’s actually pretty difficult. Lighting is crucial and you need to control it, and we’ll, I can’t. The part I’m having trouble with is making it evenly lit, and then the other part I’m having trouble with is making it dramatic.

As a photographer I had a lot of fun but I was mostly using natural light. I hated strobes, never had room for a studio, and never mastered lightning. God did the lighting for me, and he is really good at it. Really, light is what photography is all about, but I was more focused on the people aspect and the connection between us when we’re making photographs together. The light was a character in the photo and it was doing improv and really that was what every photo was like, improv. We would get props and go outside and come up with a vibe and just play it out. Product photography is a whole different process. There is an element of play, but at the end of the day you want a consistent set of images that are less about a vibe and more about showing off a product. There should be a nice cover photo to draw some interest but the rest should just show the watch.

Part of me wants to just buy more lighting, a new camera, oh and of course some expensive lights to make it easier but I know that’s not going to work.

I just have to spend hours hunched over a table playing with the toys I already have. That doesn’t really sound so bad. It doesn’t have to be perfect, in fact I want it to look like what it is, a small independent business – not some big giant conglomerate. In fact, a big giant conglomerate can’t do what I’m doing – it doesn’t scale.

What I’m Doing:

I spend hours a day pouring over 1000-1500 watch listings and buy the best watches I can find that have significant price discrepancies.

For example, I purchased the watch above for $45 from a guy in Hawaii. He listed the watch as needing a new battery. He also said it was ticking oddly, “backwards.”

Well here’s the thing, Eco-Drive watches almost never need a new battery unless they’ve been badly abused by being left in a drawer for 10 years. This watch is probably 3-5 years old. Can a quartz watch tick backwards? Only if its stator plate is damaged in which case it would only tick backwards. While the hands can stop, a quartz watch can’t really tick backwards, due to the stepper motor design.

The odd ticking in this watch is a low battery indicator and I assume that’s what he witnessed. Anyway, I decided to take a gamble on it, and it was ticking normally when it arrived. He let me know he charged it up for a few days in a window before boxing it up which is probably all that it needed.

The value of the watch in used condition is at least $150. That’s $100 profit on a $50 trade.

There are lots of these deals to be had. People price watches all over the place and there are a lot of models that look similar.

I paid $150 for this watch, other models that look just like this but don’t have a sapphire crystal or an automatic movement sell new for $200. This one retails for $575 and I’ve seen them on Amazon for $350. A used one in good condition is worth about $315.

A business that can scale doesn’t have time to sort through 1500 listings a day to find deals. Maybe in the future agentic ai can be used to hunt through listings for price discrepancies and be trained to buy at the right prices. Trading algorithms essentially already do this in the stock market but currently it seems that at this stage of things my gig is ai proof and requires too much labor to be profitable at a large scale, but can be profitable on a small scale.