What's the best way to entice the professional photography market to buy into your device? Insult them of course! At least that seems to be Nokia's strategy in its latest Lumia 1020 Ad, "Goodbye DSLR, Hello Lumia 1020."
Say what you will about Apple -- and there are many people who have a lot of not-so-nice things to say -- but the company knows how to put together an ad. From the funny Mac vs. PC commercials of old to this year's Christmas advertisement that brought many to tears, Steve Jobs vision of standing at the intersection of liberal arts and technology is often brought to life by these ads.
Apple's newest commercial gives the iPad the same treatment -- showing the gadget being used for everything from photography to filmmaking while a monologue about poetry from the movie Dead Poets Society inspires you into a creative frenzy.
There's no doubt the ubiquity of fake and mis-reported content on the Internet has turned many of us into big-time skeptics. Whenever we see something that seems incredible or outlandish, our knee-jerk reaction is to call it fake and begin searching for evidence of that fact, using our confirmation bias as a guide.
One video that elicited such a response from many of the people that saw it was this recent Sony ad that showed an a7R lens change happening in mid-air during a skydive.
Last year, a time-lapse called 'Body Evolution - Model Before and After' went viral as people the world over had their eyes opened to just how much a model can be altered with the help of hair, makeup and, most of all, Photoshop. That video has accrued almost 8 million views, and is still shared today in hopes of convincing magazines to begin putting disclaimers on images that are significantly altered in post.
The video above by ad agency Victors & Spoils takes that video and does something hilarious with it. Almost as if to say "You think that's extreme? We'll SHOW you extreme!" the agency Photoshopped the model further, from the beautiful Barbie-like cover girl into none other than Santa Claus!
Here's something really cool and creative for you to watch as you're getting ready for TGIF. The video above, a commercial for Japanese paper company Nepia, is one of the more inventive and probably difficult to create stop motion animations we've run across.
A couple of weekends ago we shared a short Ray-Ban ad that demonstrated the concept of perspective anamorphosis in a sufficiently mind-blowing way. But if you thought that video was impressive, this Honda ad will probably leave you speechless.
Anamorphosis is a technique you've probably seen used many times, even if you never knew what it was called. It's the projection technique that sidewalk artists use to make it seem like their drawings are three-dimensional when viewed from a specific angle.
Sure, the 1980s isn't quite so far in the past as, say, the first photo, but the commercial above is classic nonetheless. It shows off the Nimslo 35mm 3D camera, the first consumer level 3D lenticular camera of the 80s and, if you believe the commercial, "the most important new camera of your lifetime."
Optical image stabilization is all about keeping the camera still even as the housing shakes or otherwise moves around. And when it comes to stabilization in nature, few creatures are as good at keeping their camera (read: head) perfectly still as the chicken.
So why not strap a camera onto a chicken's head and turn the guy (or gal) into a fowl-stabilized action cam!? Why, no reason at all!
As the battle for cameraphone supremacy rages on, companies want to win over amateur and professional shooters alike. That's not to say that Nokia or Apple expects you to replace your SLR with a Lumia 1020 or iPhone 5S, but they would probably love to claim that "most professional photographers use our phone."
To that effect, Nokia has put together this video showing how its own camera expert Ari Partinen managed to pull off a real studio portrait shoot using only the Lumia 1020 and some synced external flashes.
If you've been to a play or other event put on by your child's elementary school recently, you might have experienced something similar to what the Nokia ad above depicts. Meant to tout the prowess of the Lumia 1020, it does a better job at showing just how close we've gotten to ridiculous when it comes to smartphone photography.
When they were tasked with putting together a powerful advertising campaign for Crisis Relief Singapore, ad agency Publicis Singapore mixed heart-wrenching photos with a hard-to-swallow tagline to create something quite moving.
Smartphones have been stealing market share from the big camera manufacturers for years now, and it doesn't seem like it'll stop anytime soon. Naturally, that leads to a healthy fear from companies like Canon and Nikon who, unlike Sony or Samsung, don't have players on both sides.
For its part, Canon has decided to start fighting back in the form of a new advertising campaign with the tagline: "don't let a call interrupt your photo."
Back in the mid 2000s, when Tiger Woods was the number two player in the world (and about to embark on a 281-week number one run such as has never been seen again), he was part of a Nike commercial shot by director Frank Todaro. In a fit of inspiration, Todaro asked Woods to "go ahead and aim for the camera" -- and much to the camera's disappointment, Woods did.
Adobe recently came up with a clever and funny way of promoting its Adobe Creative Day event that'll be held next week. The company visited a bus stop in Sweden and pranked people by Photoshopping them in real time into a digital movie poster advertisement displayed next to the bench. The whole thing was documented with hidden cameras and shared in the video above.
Portugal’s Krypton Films, in collaboration with production company Moonlighting and marine support company Frog Squad, recently succeeded in filming what they claim to be South Africa's first ever underwater time slice for an Aqua Das Pedras mineral water commercial.
In order to shoot the best Rolls Royce Wraith launch film possible, Angus Elliott and company pulled out all of the stops. In addition to using some very nice video cameras and all-around great filmmaking, they also wanted to shoot a bullet time sequence, for which they set up a 100 DSLR array. By their reckoning, that's the largest DSLR array shot in Europe.
Fortunately, filmmaker Jack Flynn was there to capture the process in action, and in the video above he gives us a behind the scenes peek at the making of the Rolls Royce Wraith launch video.
Last week we shared some photos from an awareness campaign by the Mexican organization Save the Children, which showed the "cycle of abuse" through powerful, hard-to-stomach photos of children growing into future abusers. The ads were meant to illustrate the statistic that 70 percent of abused children turn into abusing adults.
Spanish organization the ANAR Foundation (Aid to Children and Adolescents at Risk) recently released a campaign that makes similarly powerful use of photography, only they're taking advantage of the process of lenticular printing to send an offer of help to abused children without alerting their abusers, even if they're walking together.
Here's a new iPhone commercial Apple just released today on its website and on YouTube. It's a 1-minute-long spot that focuses on how the iPhone has shaken up the world of casual photography by becoming the world's most popular camera.
For its H5D ad campaign, Hasselblad approached underwater photographer Henrik Sorensen, knowing that he would put together something worthwhile. What he came up with is a "twisted take" on Denmark as a fairytale country that he's calling "Not Just a Fairytale," and the above video takes us behind the scenes at the underwater shoot.
One of standout commercials during the Super Bowl yesterday was the above ad by Chrysler promoting its Ram line of trucks. The 2-minute ad pays tribute to farmers across the nation, and is composed entirely of photographs showing various facets of the farming industry.
In the background is a famous speech given by radio broadcaster Paul Harvey during the 1978 Future Farmers of America convention, titled "So God Made a Farmer."
If you were watching the Thanksgiving Day NFL football games on TV today, you may have seen the above commercial promoting the Canon Rebel T4i entry-level DSLR. It's a humorous ad that asks "When was the last time something inspired you to be creative?" and shows a number of photographers putting themselves in uncomfortable (and unsafe) situations in order to capture the photograph they have in their minds eye.
We've shared examples of creative promotional mailers in the past, but we usually don't receive them. A few days ago, however, we received a small box from the folks over at Photojojo. Inside was a clever papercraft Polaroid camera that serves as both a press kit and a desk decoration.
You know those amazing high speed photos and videos of bullets being shot through various objects? BMW Canada decided …
Security camera clips that make the news usually show bad things, but Coke decided to “look at the world …
Canadian camera shop The Camera Store are the masters of viral photography-related ads …
This amazing commercial for the Canadian Paralympic Committee was shot in one continuous …
French photographers organization Union des Photographes Professionnels (UPP) launched a controversial new advertising …
To promote its new One X phone (and the camera on it), HTC came up with the bizarre idea of doing a skydiving fashion shoot with photography student Nick Jojola and model (and professional skydiver) Roberta Mancino. During the photoshoot above the Arizona desert, Jojola plummeted to Earth at 126MPH while Mancino whizzed by at 181MPH, giving the photographer a tiny window of 0.8 seconds to squeeze off the shot.
While a number of countries are taking steps to ban the unrealistic Photoshopping of models, Israel has …
For a recent advertising campaign to bring attention to its hydrogen-powered cars, Mercedes-Benz decided to make a car “invisible” …
Back in May 2011, Canadian camera shop The Camera Store released …
Polaroid and Chase Jarvis teamed up to create this “Will It Blend“-style advertisement …
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).
Japanese camera ads are sometimes very different from those you might see in the US. We’re still trying to …
Here’s a “2 minute love story” Canon commercial that aired in Thailand. In other parts of the world, this …
Here are some fantastic compliations of commercials promoting Japanese camera companies. They aired from the 1970s to the 1990s. The video above is the Canon collection.
Some Atlanta-based photographer posted a humorous Craigslist ad on Monday highlighting the fact that people often assume that photographers will be happy to do work for free.
In this social media age, companies are constantly dreaming up all kinds of random ideas for demonstrating the benefits of their products, and hoping that the videos will go viral (an example would be this bulletproof glass CEO that literally stood behind his product).
Samsung made this creative paper camera ad a couple years ago to promote its WB500 compact camera. The magical …