Here’s a pretty clever ad by Panasonic promoting their Lumix G2 camera. It’s fun seeing photographic terms appear in a commercial, and understanding what the terms mean make the commercial even funnier for photo enthusiasts.

Thanks for the tip, @mondostic!

Here are a couple new commercials for Brothers printers that blend stop-motion and time-lapse photography in pretty interesting ways with real people. We love how the technique makes the people look like claymation figures walking around in miniature sets. The foreground is done in stop-motion while time-lapse photography provided the scenes shown in the animated paper.

It would have been crazy if they had actually printed out each individual paper of the scene on the wall.
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London filmmaker Temujin Doran created this great little video for Lego that doesn’t involve any flashy effects or fancy camera techniques — just a child-like imagination. It won a prize at the prestigious Cannes Lions advertising festival in 2010.

This concept would work great with other toys and small objects, and can obviously be done as a series of photos as well.

British musician Robbie Williams was recently featured in Nikon’s “I AM NIKON” advertising campaign, with a commercial showing a fun experiment he did at a concert in 2003. He asked his audience to pull out their cameras and, on his cue, fire off the flash. The resulting scene was pretty awesome to behold. The full clip of the experiment is above.
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Since Sony’s announcement for the NEX-VG10 video camera, Sony has released another demo video with actual footage taken by the camera. The demo video has a slightly creepy storyline of a videographer following a girl around with the NEX-VG10. Nevertheless, the video has some gorgeous footage, filmed in Bali, that really emphasizes the camera’s ability to take advantage of  the lenses depth of field and wide apertures in low light. Also, keep watching for the clever shadow puppet show during the credits, complete with a puppet version of the NEX-VG10. Read more…

If you’re suffering from post-World Cup withdrawal, this might cheer you up: models frolicking on a soccer field. Actually, these women are doing much more than than that in fashion photographer Giuliano Bekor’s behind-the-scenes video of the Bebe 2010 World Cup campaign. Shooting and directing by example on the turf of the Los Angeles Memorial Stadium, Bekor pushes his models to the limit. These ladies are doing things I’d certainly never attempt in a dress and stiletto heels — running on grass, for one.

(via Fstoppers)

Back in May we featured an Olympus commercial that was shot entirely with the camera it was promoting (the Olympus PEN E-PL1), lending credence to the camera’s video capabilities.

Panasonic recently posted a behind-the-scenes video to its YouTube account showing how a new ad for their Lumix G2 camera was made. However, a close look at the video seems to reveal that most of the filming was actually done with Canon 5D Mark II cameras and a set of L lenses. Most of the comments on the video poke fun at this, with one commenter saying,

You shoot a commercial of an HD camera with another HD camera but post the footage in standard definition? Fail.

The takeaway for camera companies: eat your own dog food.

(via CrunchGear)

Olympus’ most recent E-PL1 commercial, PEN Giant, is stop-motion with a big picture — or big pictures, literally. A total of 355 prints were made on billboards and shot again, all produced with the Olympus PEN.

Olympus has a way with narrative in their commercials.

The first PEN Story came out last July, and was a little over three minutes long, but comprised of some 1,800 photos of 9,600 prints, out of a total of 60,000 photos originally taken for the project. Yeah, it gets kind of meta.

Both commercials give a creative nod to Takeuchi Taijin. Takeuchi’s stop-motion, “Wolf and Pig” might look a little familiar, if you’ve seen the original Olympus PEN Story.

In 1998, this US Navy photo was published, showing a Nikonos camera no one recognized from the IPTC caption:

NAVAL AIR BASE CORONADO, California (June 8, 1998) — Navy SEALs attached to SEAL Team One, Naval Air Base Coronado, CA, conducts training using the Nikon/Kodak DCS 425 underwater digital camera which can sends real time digital images to decision makers, and an LPI LPD tracking device uses brevity codes to send both mission status and precise longitude/latitude. U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Ted Banks. (RELEASED)

The enigmatic photo and description sparked much interest — this is a digital SLR that requires no underwater casing, and was far advanced for its time with its built-in tracking, real-time uploading, GPS, and communications. The underwater film Nikonos RS camera existed on the market already, but this futuristic iteration was unheard of in 1998.

What’s more, Kodak denied existence of the camera altogether. When Jarle Aasland of NikonWeb did some research into the matter in 2005, Kodak told him:

“I’m sorry but those cameras never existed here at Eastman Kodak. We never made cameras for that specific use. The information you have is incorrect.”

Another Kodak source told him:

“I think the issue is who they were made for.”

After further investigation into the mythical camera, Aasland finally found photos of the camera listed on eBay, hard evidence of the cameras existence. He published a story on his findings.

Days after Aasland published his article, he was contacted by Kodak’s lead engineer for the DCS cameras, Jim McGarvey. As it turns out, the camera was not quite top secret, but it was so low-profile that few knew about it, including Kodak Professional, McGarvey said. Quite simply, the specialized cameras were not advertised on a consumer level, since they were designed for government use, McGarvey wrote:

“The Nikonos body cameras were made by Kodak’s Commercial & Government Systems division. Through most of the DCS years, that group would take our commercial camera designs and adapt them for government and other special needs. Some of that work was secret, but most of the products were simply only marketed in limited venues and didn’t appear on the commer[c]ical photography radar screens. I don’t think the Nikonos cameras were ever actually secret.

…I have no idea how many Nikonos units were built, but I doubt the total would be over 100. They had no super secret special communications stuff, just standard DCS420 features.”

While it’s still highly unlikely that we’ll see such a formidable does-it-all camera on the mainstream market anytime soon, it’s pretty fascinating to see how today’s consumer products are taking a step in that direction. Some 12 years after the legendary digital Nikonos, we’ve got cameras equipped with GPS, wi-fi enabled cards for real-time uploading, and a plethora of hardy, underwater point-and-shoots on the market.

(via Nikon Rumors)