THIS MONTH IN PRINT
The Grass is Not Always Greener
July 02, 2008 Lawn mower-maker White Outdoor wanted to convey the feeling of heritage in its new ad campaign—promoting the fact that the company's products are available at the hardware store Tractor Supply Company.
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Lenovo IdeaPad U110
July 02, 2008 If you like your laptops to look sleek and stylish but you're not a Mac person—yes, I'm sure there are some of you out there—you've had few choices up until recently. And for the most part, none of those options had anything to do with the name Lenovo. Since it inherited the venerable "ThinkPad" laptop lineup from IBM several years ago, Lenovo has been known mostly for making powerful and efficient—though slightly stodgy—laptops suited mainly for on-the-go business people. That changes with Lenovo's new IdeaPad lineup, which, for the money, has some of the best-looking notebooks around—and that's including Apple's MacBook Air.
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HTC Touch Diamond
July 02, 2008 A new product that seems to have taken a page from the Apple playbook is the HTC Touch Diamond smart phone. If you have seen a picture of the Touch Diamond and have mistaken it for an Apple iPhone, you're not alone. But to call it merely an iPhone clone would not be doing the Touch Diamond justice; rather, it is a device that stands on its own and actually takes the latest in smart phone technology a step further.
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Vintage Laptop Backpack
July 02, 2008 What's the point of carrying around a good-looking laptop if you don't have a good-looking laptop bag to put it in? Though the computer and photo stores are full of bags, backpacks and cases for hauling your gear, there's a certain sameness to most of the styles. Typically, these days, they're ultra-modern looking, made of some form of waterproof nylon, and include a Velcro latch or a plastic snap somewhere on the bag to seal everything in. While that's all well and good for protecting your stuff, it does get a little boring after a while.
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Mac Pro
July 02, 2008 Taking a look at Apple's new professional computer, the 8-processor-cored Mac Pro behemoth, reminds me a little of the debate we started a couple of issues ago when comparing a medium-format digital SLR to a top-of-the-line digital SLR: one offers you pure power while the other gives you rugged portability. (There's a lot more to it than that, of course, but if you want to read the finer points, check out the May 2008 issue of PDN.)
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Software Watch
July 02, 2008 The release of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 Beta and Apple Aperture 2.1, while no longer news, is still pretty exciting. There has been a little confusion about Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0's ability to import libraries from earlier versions, and while that's not possible (nor recommended) for the Beta, the final version will, of course, allow you to transfer your libraries to the new version. The release notes for Lightroom 2.0 Beta also indicate that 2.0 Beta libraries "will be migrated to the finished version of Lightroom 2.0," but that there's no guarantee that develop settings applied in Lightroom 2.0 Beta will transfer correctly to the final version of 2.0.
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Mark Holthusen Showers Us with Music
July 02, 2008 Picture a shower hooked up to your Apple iPod, pulsing in rhythm to your favorite music. That's what we have in this contemporary Kohler shower. Even the overhead light panels in this modular and customizable bath fixture change color with the beat, and special steam heads enter the picture, as well. Now the trick was how to illustrate all this in an ad. Art director Will Chau and creative director David Crawford, with GSDM Idea City, came to us with the basic framework for the new Kohler campaign, and provided a sketch that showed a pair of dancers in the shower.
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Shooting for a Successful E-mail Promotion
July 02, 2008 Four years ago, sending e-mail promotions was a way to set yourself apart. But today it's increasingly difficult to get your message noticed. "Everyone is e-mailing now," says Toronto-based photographer Peter Schafrick. "Agencies are swamped with e-mails every day, and so it's borderline spam now."
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How to Finance Your Growth
July 02, 2008 Before he had shot a single photograph professionally, Ed McCulloch had spent $60,000 to buy equipment and to launch a marketing campaign.
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The New Portfolio
July 02, 2008 If you were to search online for a photographer—assuming you were looking for a hip young photographer who does fashion—you'd probably find Jamie Nelson.
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The Hair Apparent
July 02, 2008 New ads created by Trigger Communications & Design for Beaners, a Canadian hair salon chain for children, use over-the-top visuals shot by Jason Stang to communicate the importance of hiring a specialist for your kid's coiffure. "If you were to go to an [adult] salon you'd pay a ridiculous amount of money and they don't know how to cut kids' hair," says Todd Blevins, senior art director at the Calgary, Alberta-based agency.
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A Bunker Mentality
July 02, 2008 Lost in a tangle of overgrown brushwood and wildflowers, weathered by the relentless push and pull of voracious seawater, the war bunkers along the coast of the San Francisco Bay have lain in wait for decades for an epic conflict that never materialized. Fossilized beasts of another era, their skins teem with modern-day hieroglyphics, their luster and original purpose having vanished long ago.
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Old-School Flavor
July 02, 2008 Here is yet another series of print ads going for an old-fashioned photographic look. This time, the look is more 1980s. Many young moms today were kids who drank Kool-Aid in the Eighties, and new ads by Ogilvy & Mather in New York use imagery from Kareem Black to evoke nostalgia for the brand while introducing a sugar-free version of the drink. "We thought about what was cool about the Eighties," says agency senior copywriter Eugene Fuller. "That was the time when hip-hop was just starting out and you have some of that old-school street culture." Fuller and art director Royal Jackson got a sense of who Black was from his work, they say. The New York-based shooter—also a child of the Eighties—"got the concept and the idea of where we wanted to go with it," Jackson says. He added, "If you have a photographer who doesn't get nuance—we feel this campaign is full of details—it just falls flat."
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Bleu Light Special
July 02, 2008 We've watched Kmart try to reposition itself as a more upscale brand for years, with mixed success. In this recent campaign, the discount store enlisted the help of noted French fashion photographer Gilles Bensimon. The message: Cheap clothes can look good.
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Split Personalities
July 02, 2008 How do you know when your advertising campaign is a huge, smashing success? When the likes of Time magazine, television's Saturday Night Live, and the ESPN Sports Network decide that your ad has entered the current pop lexicon and become so ubiquitous that they can pay "homage" by borrowing your concept and putting their own personal spin on it.
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Why the Long Face?
July 02, 2008 When you're trying to create an ad that really stands out from the rest, sometimes it's best to take the road less traveled, or in this case, the mouth less shut. That was the idea behind BBDO Toronto's concept for a trio of billboards featuring ordinary Joes opening extraordinarily wide to accommodate Ruffles' new thick-cut potato chips—so wide, in fact, that in one of the ads, the model's face is a gaping zigzag from having been cranked open with a tire jack.
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Panasonic DMP-BD30K
July 02, 2008 Now that Blu-ray has won the battle of the high-definition disc formats, it's time to pick out a Blu-ray player. Life's hard, right? If you don't already have a Sony Playstation 3 (which we guiltily just purchased with our tax rebate check, telling our fiancée that we needed a "Blu-ray player" in the house) we recommend the Panasonic DMP-BD30K, which produces great-quality 1080p high-definition playback for your Blu-ray DVDs, along with providing an easy and effective way to upconvert standard-definition discs to near high-def quality.
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LaCie 324 LCD Monitor
July 02, 2008 In a review back in the April issue of PDN, I labeled the 24.1-inch Eizo ColorEdge CG241W monitor a "Ferrari" of displays, both for its high price ($2,345) and its equally high level of performance.
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Lost and Found
July 02, 2008 Photo trade associations have devoted a lot of energy to lobbying against the latest Orphan Works Act being considered in Congress. The bill, in a nutshell, would free up works for which there is no known copyright owner—including some photos now protected automatically by the Copyright Act.
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Calumet Imagemaker DVDs
July 02, 2008 I receive a ton of instructional photography DVDs in the mail every month, even more than photo books. Unfortunately, most of them are horrible. One series of photography DVDs I would recommend, however, for anyone interested in learning more about the art of photography is Calumet's Imagemaker series. Though they're aimed more at aspiring professionals than working professionals, these well-produced educational documentaries have a lot to offer to anyone who wants to either brush up on his or her shooting basics, or get inspired to take more pictures. (As a point of full disclosure, PDNonline has used some video content from one of the people behind this Calumet series, Gerry Oher, in the past.)
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Picture Story: The High Cost of Food
July 02, 2008 It's one thing to write about the economics of soaring food prices, and quite another to photograph the story in the barren reaches of North Dakota while snow is on the ground and the farmers are still hibernating. But Washington Post photographer Michael Williamson leapt at the challenge, and his project about America's wheat shortage is an example of the images that experience, enterprise and a lot of hard miles in a car can turn up.
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Remembering Cornell Capa
July 02, 2008 Few individuals have done more to foster a sense of community among working photographers than Cornell Capa. A photojournalist and Magnum member, he formed the International Fund for Concerned Photography in 1966, and founded the International Center of Photography in 1974. His dedication to the idea that photography can make a difference, and the museum and educational institution he created, have inspired photographers for five decades.
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Sigma DP1
June 02, 2008 A pocket-sized digital camera that can produce image quality on par with a digital SLR has been something of a Holy Grail for street photographers. In recent months several notable contenders have come to the throne, including the Canon G9 and the Ricoh GX100, both of which I've mentioned in brief in my Objects of Desire column for PDN.
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Richard Billingham: Back To The Land
June 02, 2008 British photographer Richard Billingham was propelled into the spotlight in the mid-Nineties with a documentary project about his dysfunctional family, which he published in the book Ray's a Laugh (Scalo 1996). Billingham, then a fine-art student, wanted to paint his chronic alcoholic father, Ray, his obese, chain-smoking mother and his slacker brother, all of whom lived together in a high-rise project in Birmingham, England's second-largest city. Because his subjects never sat still long enough to be painted, Billingham turned to a cheap snapshot camera to document them. The images were technically raw, but that somehow intensified their power and intimacy. They were unflinching, at times comically bleak and sometimes tender. He was right in the face of his troubled subjects—too much so, said his detractors, who accused him of exploitation.
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High Plains Drifter
June 02, 2008 Every summer when he was a boy, Peter Brown drove across the country with his family from Palo Alto, California, where his father taught at Stanford University, to Heath, Massachusetts, where the Browns still maintain a summer home. He fell in love with the American West in the 1960s, but the landscape that left its imprint on his soul was the vast open space of the High Plains—the flat, arid tablelands that seem to stretch on forever once you cross the Rockies.
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The Soul of the Roma
June 02, 2008 Fate would seem to have had a hand in leading Danish photographer Joakim Eskildsen to photograph the Roma, or "gypsies" as outsiders commonly call them. Eskildsen was living in Finland and traveling in Eastern Europe in 2000 when, at the suggestion of a local artist friend, he paid a visit to Violet Street, the Roma quarter of the Hungarian village of Hevesaranyos. He fell in love with the bleak yet beautiful little settlement and the colorful people who inhabited it.
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Portraits Out of Time
June 02, 2008 These portraits of soldiers, all captured on glass or metal plates, have the grain and patina of age that suggests they came from the dusty pages of a history book. Yet these men and women are wearing modern uniforms known to us from our current conflicts. The men and women in the photos could be your sister or your doctor or the guy at the door with the pizza.
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A Singular Vision
June 02, 2008 With its weighty, book-like heft, its self-professed mission to expound on global matters, unabashed elitism and nearly 300 commissioned photographs in every issue, the monthly magazine Monocle is hard to ignore or put down. Having survived into its second year in business, this highly original publication looks set to become an institution.
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Steve Bloom: Game On
June 02, 2008 "Essentially I'm trying to encapsulate what I see and feel when I shoot. Whatever I photograph, I set out to convey the atmosphere of the scene," says wildlife photographer Steve Bloom.
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Casio Exilim EX-F1
June 02, 2008 The Casio Exilim EX-F1 is a weird camera—but I say that with a mixture of awe and admiration. And also, I must add, with some serious confusion.
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Tim Laman: The Jungle Look
June 02, 2008 When scientists are sent out on research grants by the National Geographic Society, they are encouraged to shoot photos to document their work. In the mid-Nineties Tim Laman, an enthusiastic young rain forest biologist with a PhD from Harvard, took this encouragement a little more to heart than his colleagues. For his research project on fig trees in Borneo, he sent in hundreds of rolls of film, filling three huge bins in National Geographic magazine's photo department.
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Picture Story: Prisons as Mental Wards
June 02, 2008 The first time photographer Jenn Ackerman saw the Correctional Psychiatric Treatment Unit at the Kentucky State Reformatory, the word that came to her mind was "trapped."Fellow students in her Ohio University masters program tried to persuade her to come up with a better title for her capstone project, but Ackerman couldn't get it out of her head.
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Game, Set and Match
June 02, 2008 Paul Lang, proprietor and chief retoucher at The Orange Apple, a relatively new retouching venture in Vancouver, recently collaborated with California-based photographer Tim Tadder to produce a series of high-end images for Gatorade's new G2. Unlike Gatorade's best-known beverage, the new drink is for situations off the playing field—what Gatorade calls "non-sweat" situations. Matt Kubis, of Chicago agency Element 79 and art director for the drink campaign, described G2 as a low-calorie Gatorade designed to keep athletes hydrated when they're off the field.
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RED Scarlet
June 02, 2008 This much buzzed-about forthcoming camcorder from RED called Scarlet isn't actually red or scarlet at all but rather—yes, you guessed it—black. The Scarlet isn't just cool because of the way it looks—though its rugged, Alien/Terminator exterior is certainly eye-catching—it's cool because of what it can do. Let's start with some background:
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Kingston DataTraveler BlackBox
June 02, 2008 Did you know that those infamous "black box" cockpit voice recorders they try to recover after a plane crash aren't black at all, they're actually orange? If, like us, that strikes you as a bit odd, you might also be perplexed to discover that the new Kingston DataTraveler BlackBox isn't a box at all, but rather a slender USB drive that looks more like a pack of chewing gum than a flight recorder. It is black, however, and it does have an important mission—to provide government-validated protection for your photos and data.
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Buffalo 1TB LinkStation Mini
June 02, 2008 If you want to back up your digital content in a networked environment nothing beats a good NAS (Network Attached Storage) device—especially one as small and discreet as the black (yes, black!) LinkStation Mini from Buffalo. With a whopping 1 terabyte (tb) of storage and a fast 1 Gigabit Ethernet connection, the LinkStation Mini combines space with convenience including Buffalo's handy Web Access feature that lets you grab your images off the NAS from anywhere, whether you're in Kansas or Katmandu, as long as you have access to Internet service.
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Sony Rolly
June 02, 2008 Greetings and welcome to the first annual "All-Black" edition of Objects of Desire sponsored by New Zealand's famed "All Blacks" national rugby team. (Just kidding.)
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Bringing the Color Back to Paris's Dark Days
June 02, 2008 Paris has been reliving its wartime occupation by the Nazi army recently through a highly controversial exhibition at the Bibliotheque Historique de la Ville de Paris (BHVP) in the hip Marais district. On show are 270 digitally remastered color prints of remarkable quality, made from 35mm Agfacolor transparencies shot between 1941 and 1944 with a Leica by the Franco-Italian Andre Zucca (1899-1973).
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All That Jazz
June 02, 2008 For "Discover Freedom," the Honda Jazz campaign that launched in New Zealand recently, small budgets and tight time frames meant that the art director—Janelle Olsen of Sugar Advertising in Auckland—became prop finder, and the photographer—New Zealander Alan McFetridge—became location scout.
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Banks A Lot
June 02, 2008 Print advertising for banking and financial services always presents agencies with a creative challenge: How do you convey your client's message in a visually compelling way that will grab the attention of a potential customer? Lots of facts and figures won't do it, so marketers are relying more and more on simple graphic imagery combined with a punchy message. A good example of creative thinking in this sector is Austin agency McGarrah Jessee's print campaign for Frost, a Texas bank.
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Card Trick
June 02, 2008 It may seem like this is the special Canadian issue of Behind The Lens, but we swear it's a complete coincidence. This campaign for Visa Canada, created by Leo Burnett, Toronto and shot by local photographer Hamin Lee, encourages cardholders to purchase items at Shoppers Drug Mart, a national Canadian pharmacy. When consumers used their Visa card at the pharmacy, they were automatically entered into a contest to win all their Visa purchases for a month. In three executions, everyday items are composited onto aspirational items such as a mountain bike, a plasma TV and a golf bag, showing how everyday purchases can turn into something bigger. The luxury items are props and the pharmacy items were shot separately and then added in post. "Hamin always embraces any challenge, be it creative or technical, that comes along with a more conceptual project," says art buyer Leila Courey. "His meticulous eye, relentless commitment and buttoned-down production were integral to the success of each execution."
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Oh The Pain!
June 02, 2008 Blood, teeth and hair all have starring roles in this local campaign for a skate shop in Toronto. The name of the store, So Hip It Hurts, could also aptly describe these ads. "Their brief to us was like, 'Go offensive,'"says creative director Lyranda Martin-Evans of Saatchi & Saatchi. The three ads, shot by photographer Bryan Helm, show the bloody aftermath of a bad wipeout on a skateboard or snowboard. "They have stopping power, obviously," Helm says of the ads. "It's sort of more gruesome for what you're imagining." To find authentically ground-down curbs and railings, Helm and the creative team went to popular skate areas in Toronto. Art director Marissa Mastenbroek, who was eight-months pregnant at the time, insisted that the fake blood look realistic. For one shot, she even spit fake blood out onto the pavement to get the proper spittle effect. "It must have looked ridiculous to passers-by," Mastenbroek says.
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England's Green and Pleasant Land
June 02, 2008 Richard Billingham, whose landscape photography is featured in this issue ("Richard Billingham: Back To The Land," page 34) says he is a big fan of the serene and beautiful landscape photography of Jem Southam.
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