cathpah
Senior Member
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- Sep 10, 2012
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And I very much appreciate your opinion...so keep chiming in! Okay, I'll disregard that photo of Bl@ster's boots in hopes that they were mislabeled.Hey, I post my opinion, so always remember that.
And in my opinion, those boots are definitely not brown smooth (or at least the leather White's refers to as brown smooth). The leather on them is brown, and it is smooth. It could be the lighting. I asked both White's and Baker's, and White's brown smooth leather is their darkest brown, I believe. I asked Kyle what the lightest colored thick brown leather was, and he said distressed.
Andy B.
First off...good call on that link to EastWest's site. I had forgotten all about that (originally read most of this thread a few months back when I was first interested in White's), and that really is incredibly helpful.Just thought I'd make a quick comment here.
Try this link. It is (IMO) one of the best efforts at capturing the different leathers used by White's. The only problem is I don't know what the difference is between "Brown Oil Tan" and "Brown Smooth" on this link. From talking to Baker's I understood these to be the same thing. Maybe someone else knows the answer.
On a more general note, and this may not be what you want to hear, but photos are completely subjective and should form only a small part of your research. Speaking from having bought and sold a couple of dozen very expensive watches via online forums, one of the things I've learned was that the photos/images give you the feeling of absolute objective truth. In reality, partly because of the online medium, we begin to equate the image with the thing... but images are framed and contextualised in different ways, they're placed in a context, and even you and me as the viewer bring in our own context and therefore view the image in unique (and often different) ways. To be honest, I learned with watches not to place much emphasis on photos. The most important information is the story (history, experience, details, etc.). If the story is not consistent then alarm bells start ringing even if the images are faultless.
What does this mean in the case of the boots? If you can't see handle them directly then I'd be inclined to listen to the individual stories that people have on here. Ask for an account of their direct experience and not just a link to a googled image.
If its any help... I just ordered a pair of White's using Smooth Brown. I made the decision after calling a couple of people who had direct experience with the leather. I was tossing up between Smooth Brown and Brown CXL and was swayed to the former on the basis of the less uniform surface colour and the thicker, tougher character of the Smooth Brown leather. The conclusion that I came to on colour was that both were a similar, relatively light "mid brown".
As far as the rest of what you said, you're speaking my language. I'm a professional photographer, and everything you said is spot-on. I think I may need to find some patiences (not my strong suit) and wait for White's to send me the leather samples.
To be clear, in your last sentence are you saying that the brown smooth is *not* uniform in color? If so, I think that's a good thing, as I really love the character that some leathers have. I don't want these to look like "**** kickers" so avoiding a matte/medium brown is really crucial to me.