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mark meyer photography • anchorage • alaska
Journal | A genius, so to speak, for sauntering
...notes on the landscape, wilderness & photography
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Laughing-Stock
Monday · July 26, 2010 | posted under: Musings · Media | 0 comments
Craigslist Find—Argus C3 | Studio
I speak of the strong men
Who shoulder their burdens in the hot day,
Who stand in the market place
And bargain in loud voices,
Showing their stock to the world.—Slainthe!, Patrick MacGill
The Anchorage Marketing blog is running a short post and interview with me:
Custom professional photography can make all the difference
Aside from featuring me (a quality I greatly admire in blogs) they also make an important point about the limited utility of stock photography. Knowing when and how to use stock photography is a talent in its own right. So is knowing when not to. When designers and marketers do it poorly their message misses the mark, sometimes badly enough to expose the company to negative publicity and ridicule.
For instance: Kodak Demonstrates Its Awesome Camera Technology With Stock Photo
It's not just the delicious irony of using a stock photo to advertise a camera—the photographic equivalent of lip-syncing—you inevitably dilute your message by sharing the images across a wide spectrum of photo buyers. Tineye.com makes this too easy to discover. Chris Barton asks, "Why would a reputable company do this to themselves." It's not a new problem; the Wall Street Journal was commenting on it way back in 2006.
For those that want to do it right, Paul Boag from Headscape offers some good advice to the would-be stock photo customer: Stop using stock photography clichés.
For those that just want a cheap laugh, Awkward Stock Photos delivers. (iStockPhoto apparently didn't get the joke.)
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Anchorage G Street Outtakes
Friday · July 23, 2010 | posted under: Musings · New Images · Media | 4 comments
Modern Dwellers Chocolate Lounge | Anchorage
Travel photography tends to be about capturing the differences you find, either in the landscape or culture or food, between what you live with and what you find when go somewhere else. This makes a travel piece about your home town a challenge because we discount the amazing things around around us, always thinking that photography would be easier if we could just travel. As you walk around Anchorage in the summer you see tourists from every part of the world in rapt wonder, cameras at the ready, because it's all so interesting—to them. But when you see it every day, you simply stop looking. Overcoming the creative languor of shooting near home turns out to be exercise in reacquainting vision with surroundings, which when the pressure is on, is harder than I expected. The pressure was on recently while shooting an assignment for the New York Times travel section about Anchorage. The point of the piece was that Anchorage is a pretty cool place with all sorts of things for the traveller beyond the quintessentially Alaskan. Anchorage is a great place and the assignment was tons of fun, giving me an excuse to get to know some of the local establishments and people in a way that always seems easy to postpone when you're in your home town.
The Slideshow at NYtimes.com
Across or Down, Anchorage Is Alive
…And Some Outtakes
Octopus Ink Gallery
www.octopusinkclothing.com
The Glacier Brewhouse
www.glacierbrewhouse.com
Modern Dwellers Chocolate Lounge
www.moderndwellers.com
Alaska Cake Studio
www.alaskacakestudio.com
Sacks Cafe
www.sackscafe.com
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Faux-tos
Tuesday · July 20, 2010 | posted under: Digital Alterations | 0 comments
It looks like somebody needs to spend a little more time with the Photoshop For Dummies
BP's latest faux-photo faux-pas: poorly-faked screens inserted over the blank ones at their crisis control center. One would think that with BP's resources someone would buy that poor retoucher a wacom tablet, a subscription to Lynda.com, and an update to the latest version of Mac Paint. John Aravosis dissects the images in detail, although he doesn't seem to understand that the camera's capture date can be wrong and goes a step too far in accusing BP of a total forgery based exclusively on the image metadata. The Washington Post quotes Scott Dean, a spokesman for BP, "We've instructed our post-production team to refrain from doing this in the future." Seriously? They have a postproduction team turning out work of this embarrassing caliber? Are they using an Etch-a-Sketch?
Getty freelancer Marc Feldman show's how a professional does it. He convincingly disappeared a caddy behind golfer Matt Bettencourt with an adeptness that would make the politburo proud. Unfortunately, despite his photoshop prowess, the Finder got the best of him. According to Feldman he was demonstrating how easy such manipulation is and accidentally saved the image to the send folder instead of the desktop. Both images ended up going out where eagle-eyed photo editor Guy Reynolds spotted it. Despite the simple explanation, it cost Feldman his contract with Getty. Explanations rarely save the photographer in these situations, but photo editors are a different story. For comparison of the difference between a photographer and an editor altering an image see Mike Johnson at The Online Photographer on The Economist's doctored cover image of President Obama.
Finally, lest you think it's only upstanding energy giants and professional photographers who get nabbed for photo fakery, the New York Post is running a story about Daryl Simon, who in an effort to secure a more lenient sentence for fraud, submitted faked images of himself doing charity work. The article quotes prosecutors, "Evidence…can be seen by examining the single detail on his shirt above his fingers -- that detail appears on the left side of the shirt in the top photograph…" Yes, it appears the images had to be studied carefully to spot the fraud suggesting that Mr. Simon's photoshop skills, while not at the level of a Getty Freelancer, might exceed those of BP's postproduction team. Perhaps he could arrange some sort of work from prison deal.
If you are interested in the history of photo manipulation, Hany Farid's Photo Tampering Throughout History is an good survey of the landmarks.
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Some local color
Saturday · July 10, 2010 | posted under: New Images | 0 comments
For the New York Times: Across or Down, Anchorage Is Alive
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© Mark Meyer