For a recent advertising campaign to bring attention to its hydrogen-powered cars, Mercedes-Benz decided to make a car “invisible” by creating a novel cloaking device using LEDs and a Canon 5D Mark II. One side of the car was covered with several mats of LEDs that display what the DSLR sees on the other side.

(via Photoxels)

Here’s something that’ll blow your mind (sorry that it’s an ad): stare at the colored dots on this girl’s nose for 30 seconds, then quickly look at a white wall or ceiling (or anything pure white) and start blinking rapidly. Congratulations, you just processed a negative with your brain!

(via eject via Rob Sheridan)

P.S. Next time you’re in the photo lab, try doing this trick with your loupe and lightbox to save yourself some test prints.

Back in May 2011, Canadian camera shop The Camera Store released a humorous advertisement that quickly went viral, amassing millions of views. Here’s the sequel to that video, showing another violent engagement between two groups of well trained photographers.

There might be a giant corporate scandal hovering over its head, but that’s not stopping Olympus from planning big things for its digital camera lineup. The company has placed a giant full page advertisement in Amateur Photographer magazine with the headline “OH MY GOODNESS!”. 43 Rumors is reporting that the company will be announcing a new Micro Four Thirds camera around February 8th that’s part of the 40-year-old OM camera lineup — in other words, a digital mirrorless camera that’s beautifully retro-styled. A trademark application filed on January 3rd indicates that camera will be called the Olympus OM-D (D as in digital). Watch out Fujifilm: Olympus is coming for you!

(via 43 Rumors)

Image credit: Olympus OM-1n by Attila con la cámara

Polaroid and Chase Jarvis teamed up to create this “Will It Blend“-style advertisement for the the Polaroid Z340 instant digital camera. It’s a clever idea, but poor cameras!

As newspapers and magazines struggle to keep eyeballs from turning to the free world of the Web, more and more blogs are rising up to fill the niches once dominated by print. Despite the changing landscape, magazines are still able to command high advertising rates that blogs can’t match (yet). Wanting to find out whether magazines or blogs provided the best bang of each advertising buck, photographer Trey Ratcliff recently spent $26,000 placing ads in three major photography magazines, comparing the results to his online affiliate ad returns. His conclusion?

If I was consulting for one of these product companies that puts significant funds into magazine advertising, I would challenge them to try something new for six months: Try taking 50% of that money and put it into several hundred blogs, podcasts and review sites and measure the results. Cut the worst performers and find new ones.

Only one of the three magazines actually made Ratcliff money (the other two lost over ten thousand dollars) — the one that included an online ad rotation as part of the package.

Stop Advertising in Photo Magazines – Head West to the Web [Trey Ratcliff]

Thanks for sending in the tip, Troy!

Team Detroit came up with a clever series of anti-drug-style advertisements for the College of Creative Studies. Have you talked to your kids about Photoshopping?
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Japanese camera ads are sometimes very different from those you might see in the US. We’re still trying to figure out whether this is a commercial for the Fujifilm X10 or a trailer for an upcoming horror movie…

You can find a 60 second version of this same ad on Fujifilm’s Facebook page.

(via ecpz)

Award winning Korean photo studio Indylab shot this award winning advertisement without the aid of computer generated imagery. Instead, they manually tossed and photographed phones one at a time, and then composited all the images afterward.
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Here’s a “2 minute love story” Canon commercial that aired in Thailand. In other parts of the world, this would probably be categorized as a “thriller” rather than a “romance”. The comments for the video on YouTube are dominated with the words “creepy” and “stalker”.

(via Pixiq)