Commercials for forgettable products using clueless "photographers"

<p>There have been two TV commercials using "photographers" who couldn't find their way around a P&S. One has shows an outdoor scene with a photographer posing a model and adjusting the focus on his Hasselblad 501 or 503...with the film advance lever.</p>

<p>The other, more recent, has a female photographer shooting a landscape scene with a 4X5 field camera (Toyo, maybe). She's standing alongside the camera, concentrating intently on the scene while grasping the cable release, ready to shoot. Problem is, the image is still plainly visible on the ground glass and, God help me, it's right-side up.</p>

<p>Anyone else seen anything like these unintentional jokes?</p>

<p>wow... do you have the links for these? I have only seen stuff in print ads where the camera and model look so out of place.</p>

<p>Two words: "Ashton" and "Kutcher"<br /><br />It's not so much that he wouldn't know how to use those Nikon cameras (in fact, I believe he actually does enjoy using them, and has certainly been around a lot of professional photography going on). The clueless part is the portrayal of how, why, and to what end he's using the damn things. It sort of comes across like the photographic equivalent of playing the Air Guitar.</p>

<p>One of my favs is the Canon commercial on TV where they show beautiful, highly focused, brilliant color, freeze frame images of NFL players at the peak of action.</p>

<p>Then we see the advertisement for a mom or kid using their entry level DSLR with a 18-55 or whatever from the stands 400 feet away! LOL</p>

<p>I wonder what mom & dad will think when they come to the realization <em>"Hey, my pics don't look like that?"</em><br>

<em></em><br>

Advertising..Gotta' love it.</p>

<p>There's one I've seen around here (Pittsburgh) of a guy peering intently through a Nikon F with an FTn finder. So far so good - unfortunately his index finger, poised to take that critical shot, is pressing down on the hub of the wind on lever, rather than on the shutter release. You'd think the actual photographer taking the pic of "the photographer" would have enough kop to get the guy to pretend to press the right button, but no. Of course, those old cameras are just so <em>complicated</em> .....</p>

<p>Another one that gets (dis)honorable mention: A videographer paddling a canoe on a river in a tropical jungle. He has a huge video camera on a studio-grade tripod standing up in the canoe. Hello, alligators...</p>

<blockquote>

<p>There have been two</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Two what? Two hundred? Two thousand? For decades, movies, TV shows, and commercials have shared several cliches...</p>

<ul>

<li>All cameras make the sound of a 35mm motor drive, whether or not a drive is attached, including Leica rangefinders, Rolleiflexes, and Blads. (and the studio strobes keep up with the Blad at 3 frames/second). </li>

<li>Any image can be blown up as much as is necessary to recognize one face in a crowd of thousands, or read a license plate number a mile away. This was as true in the film days as it is in the digital days.</li>

<li>Just like John Wayne manages to get an average of 23 shots from each 6 shooter, cameras typically get dozens more shots on a roll than anyone expects.</li>

<li>Photographers say things like "make love to the camera".</li>

</ul>

<p>My favorite abuse of photographic equipment: a scene in "Trilogy of Terror" where a mad woman explodes a darkroom by dropping a match into a tray of developer.</p>

<p>It's advertising. It's not selling a product, it's selling an experience. If you own the [insert product here] you too will be popular/interesting/respected/envied etc.</p>

<p>There's nothing in it for advertisers to be accurate and truthful.</p>

<p>True, Joseph! And, any flash that sounds like the ones they use on CSI would scare the crap out of me.</p>

<p>... and "photographers" holding up SLRs in front of them to stare at the back of the camera as they reel off a shot (even before liveview)</p>

<p>... and the gaggle of "photographers" with enormous, looooong, big-white lenses, grabbing shots of someone at point blank range</p>

<p>... and the "photographers" holding cameras with enormous, big, long lenses by the camera body, with nothing to support the lens... OOF! </p>

<p>These and countless other non-photographic weirdnesses lead me to believe actors haven't a clue how to do anything that 99% of the world would consider "everyday stuff."</p>

<p>.... e.g. the guy fixing the car that won't start by fiddling with the radiator</p>

<p>... e.g. the carpenter who is building something, screwing all the screws counterclockwise</p>

<p>... etc...</p>

<p>The only one that has annoyed me in any way other than a "shake head and chuckle" have been the Canon "sports" ads that show the rebel series cameras making images at, what seems to me to be, a faster frame rate than would be possible (3fps or whatever those bodies shoot). I feel like it's giving people unreasonable expectations. Though I do like the commercials themselves and think they are well done.</p>

<p>

<p>But who knows, perhaps if you times everything JUST right, you could make it happen with a Rebel body.</p>

<p>EDIT: a search on the subject brings up this page on Rob Galbraith:</p>

<p>http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/content_page.asp?cid=7-9310-9451</p>

Advertising is for effect not truth. The effect is greater if there is an image of the ground glass, right side up, than if there is not.

 

Sometimes there is a joke that only photographers will "get". In an old Jerry Lewis movie, Jerry is about to take a photo with a view camera. He takes the film holder, pulls up the dark slide, looks at the film and says, "That's a good emulsion" then reinserts the dark slide and puts the film holder into the camera. I was the only one in the theater laughing.

My personal favorite (that hasn't been mentioned above): some movie I was watching a while ago had a

gaggle of photographers shooting someone on stage. The view of the crowd was from the perspective of

someone standing on the stage looking down.

 

1) Not a single flash went off even though every single camera had a mounted Speedlite shooting in a

dark room.

 

2) One of the photographers was supporting her DSLR with giant lens by holding the left side of the

DLSR body with her left hand and the Speedlite with her right hand (her finger kept moving to push on the

front of the Speedlite).

<p>Hmmm......wonder if Ken Rockwell produces any of these?</p>

<p>Being on the "inside" gives a much different perspective then for those not privy to that knowledge. The ads are not targeting people who have been photographers for years, but are designed to attract new customers, without the knowledge of what they are seeing is impossible. We all know this; sometimes it is amusing, but sometimes it can be very frustrating. As a cop for the last twenty years, I can’t watch police based television shows because all I see are the things they get wrong in order to make the story or enhance the drama. The reality is far less entertaining. Shows like CSI and the like are worse because they have created an unreasonable expectation of what should be available and how cases should be handled. People don’t understand why a case does not get solved in under 50 minutes, or why vast amounts of resources are not being utilized to locate their stolen laptop computer that they left in their unlocked car overnight.<br>

Every specialized field will have people that don’t know the intricacies involved make statements or claims that could not possibly be valid, or show their total lack of knowledge about what they are talking about. I have an interest in quantum physics, but I would never assume to know what the hell I was talking about in a room full of physicists!</p>

<p>We can be confident that almost any endeavor portrayed in TV commercials is presented incorrectly. It is TV after all. At least the backlash here isn't like the one involving Star Trek when Picard was using a telescope with outdoor lights on all around him. Some of the veiwership found it to be an intolerable slight against all that is astronomy and snickered about it on internet forums.</p>

<p>My favorite photographic faux pas is still the press photog with the fully extended bellows on a Speed Graphic in countless old (and some new) movies. Then there's the Pacemaker Graphic being used in a WWII or previous era setting. </p>

I always wanted to get one of those movie Speed Graphics where you never had to insert a film holder, pull out a dark slide or cock the shutter and still take picture after picture.

<p>Advertising is the most successful form of trolling. The worse they are, the more they make you talk about it.</p>

<p><strong>Kevin</strong> , you should see my wife (a registered nurse) during an episode of ER (or any hospital show or hospital scene in almost any movie). And the chief forensics photographer for the City of Detroit Department is an old friend of mine. He gets quite upset about the show CSI (but loves "LA Law", go figure).</p>

<p><strong>John</strong> , I never noticed that particular telescope gaffe, but I sure noticed that Picard wasn't fingering his flute in anything that came even close to the music that he was supposed to be playing on the episode "The Inner Light". But it's still a favorite of mine.</p>

<p>I agree with the above post that hollywood gets it wrong with guns in a far more egregious manner than they do with cameras. I am not downplaying gun violence, just making the suggestion that I believe an awful lot of people fear guns based in some part on what they see on TV and in movies where you can pick up a pistol and shoot people one handed while rolling across the floor Lethal Weapon style, LOL. Every gun holds 1000 rounds. Bullets throw sparks when they hit concrete, trees, tires. Big guns blow people through windows. You can hit someone at 100 yards with your .38 snub while running.</p>

<p>My favorite Hollywood-ism is that everything blows up. Car wreck? BETTER GET OUT! Why is gas always dripping? Why is the seat already on fire?</p>

<p>Yes, everything blows up, but if you jump at exactly the right time the blast won't kill you. You can surf the fire ball for fifty feet or so and land clutching the hot leading lady or if you have CIA training you can fly along on the blast wave and dive into the water as the fire ball rolls over your head. You need CIA training for that, though, because only the CIA teaches you how to swim for ten minutes holding your breath and using the fireball to light your way.</p>

<p>Does anyone know why terrorists follow the Internation Bomb Wire Code? Of course you cut the blue wire! Everyone knows that! Red is a decoy! Blue makes the clock go faster! And it's a good thing they tied that giant digital alarm clock to the bomb so everyone knows how much time they have to cut the wire.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Advertising ==> suspension of disbelief.</p>

<p>Well, that, and the fact that 99.9% of consumers won't notice the idiosyncrasy.</p>

<p>And, yes, the Ashton shots are a hoot. Don't we all fly through the air snapping perfectly exposed pics at an indoor party?</p>

 

<p>As someone has pointed out above, every specialized field will be rendered on screen in a way that makes the insiders laugh (in the better case) or will upset them. I am an astrophysicist by trade, and every time a movie stumbles over something astrophysics-related, portrays an astronomer, or, God help us, peers into an observatory, I am ready to see and hear some major display of absurdity.</p>

<p>My all time favorite is Jodie Foster in Contact LISTENING with EARPHONES at the radio signals coming from distant stars, looking for a sign of intelligence, while sitting IN HER CAR in the middle of the Socorro desert amidst the VLA antennas... I mean: that scene is so embarrassing that I don't even find it fun. I sort of feel ashamed for her. It will be difficult to beat that, but I'm confindent some director sooner or later will succeed.</p>

<p>L.</p>