By and large, as a professional of whatever description, clients hire you based on experience and expertise, grace under pressure, problem-solving skills, and your finely-tuned ability to transcend the limitations of the assignment and distill the essence of an idea into its most purely realized form.

Okay so that’s what they [...]]]>

By and large, as a professional of whatever description, clients hire you based on experience and expertise, grace under pressure, problem-solving skills, and your finely-tuned ability to transcend the limitations of the assignment and distill the essence of an idea into its most purely realized form.

Okay so that’s what they tell you in college, but honestly it’s mostly just blather. Assignment photography is a hot-dog factory where the end results are images rather than sausages. If people saw what went into some of this stuff there’s no way they’d want anything to do with it. The sad reality is that there are all kinds of reasons you’re brought in on projects, some of them more edifying than others. Sometimes you’re exactly the right person for the job, other times you’re just a camera monkey. My favourite is the “wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if” call, where everyone gets all excited about an idea that turns out to be completely impractical. Well, this is the story of one of those ideas that  actually managed to see the light of day.

A bit of background. For the past couple of years I’ve been working with a company called Castor, creating a library of images to use online and in various collateral materials. Castor are well-known for lighting and furniture but are best described as a multidisciplinary design studio, involved in various ventures like restaurants and interior design as well as art commissions. We had come up with a very nice family of images, but in all honesty their web site needed some work. Which was what The Call was about. Brian from Castor had seen an article about the Gigapan, an automated camera mount designed for shooting epic panoramic landscapes. The images it generates are extremely high resolution and allow viewers to dive deep into photos to examine them in minute detail. What if we used a Gigapan image as the basis for the Castor web site! Cool, right?

Our initial concept was to create an elaborate panorama of the city, stationing various Castor products in different neighbourhoods throughout the shot. This quickly proved to be a nightmarish proposition. Between choreographing the various sites, obtaining permits on the number of streets involved, and planning for weather and traffic delays, it simply wasn’t going to work. The other problem was that the final image would look pretty much like just another Gigapan shot; not to take away from the Gigapan but it’s such a unique device that the photos it generates have become a genre all their own.

Then we came up with what seemed like a much simpler solution; lets shoot some shelves! The idea was that we would style them with various pertinent  – and impertinent — props, and visitors would be able to zoom in and explore the shot. As a bonus, there seemed to be no precedent for using a Gigapan in a studio-based manner like this, which we found rather appealing; as we discovered there were some very good reasons for that. At any rate, Mike Blain from Taxi2, the interactive division of the renowned Taxi ad agency, signed on to develop and implement the idea, and I agreed to shoot it, with an eye to coming up with a seemingly matter-of-fact and straightforward image of shelves in order to make the Gigapan effect all the more surprising. In the end however it turned out to be not very straightforward at all. The shoot day was a lot of fun however; check out this behind the scenes video for a sense of how it all came together:

The primary challenges on the shooting side had to do with the Gigapan itself. First of all, there weren’t any in the country. Once I found one and shipped it up here, I was stumped — the instructions didn’t say much about shooting product photos with one. Usually when I work with a new piece of gear I consult with assistants or photographers who’ve used it before, but nobody I talked to had ever even seen a Gigapan, so there was a fair amount of trial-and-error involved. The main difficulties all derived from the fact that it’s not really designed for shooting anything close-up, which was of course what we were trying to do, and it quickly started giving us headaches. We wanted a really big shot, and the Gigapan didn’t disappoint – at 75000 by 60000 pixels (4500 megapixels / 4.5 gigapixels) the final image is, as best we can tell, the largest photo of shelves ever taken. However the gargantuan file quickly became an utter horror to work with; there was a lot more retouching required than we had anticipated. It took fifteen minutes or more to merely open, and then the various perspective and stitching errors introduced by the short camera-to-subject distance had to be corrected individually. Even the tiniest edits took up to 20 minutes to render, with more elaborate adjustments taking even longer; as various photoshop layers were added the file ballooned crazily in size and Taxi had to resort to working on it in sections.

The more complicated stuff turned out to be on the implementation end. We shot this in July of last year and it’s just launched now. By all accounts it was a titanic development project. A lot of man-hours were burned up behind the scenes and credit should go where credit is due; Mike and his team deserve a huge round of applause for their efforts. The end result looks incredible, and it’s easily one of the most amazing websites I’ve ever seen. Take some time to explore the page — there are all sorts of Easter eggs hidden and scattered throughout, and it’s oddly addictive to just scroll around looking at stuff.

So what to take away from the experience? Well, for one thing, with the right team, anything is possible. Secondly, nothing is ever as straightforward as you think. Third, it’s highly entertaining to use a piece of gear in completely the wrong way, but beware.

Last but not least, I should never grow a beard. I’d been cultivating one for six months or so when shoot day rolled around, and as soon as I saw the behind-the-scenes footage, I shaved the thing off. Nobody noticed for three days.

Well that was fun.

The tissue box promotion is making the rounds, and the response has been outstanding. The screen grab above is from Facebook, shortly after I wrote about the project for the first time (The very talented Paul Riss is an associate creative director at DDB [...]]]>  

Well that was fun.

The tissue box promotion is making the rounds, and the response has been outstanding. The screen grab above is from Facebook, shortly after I wrote about the project for the first time (The very talented Paul Riss is an associate creative director at DDB – check out his fantastic blog, Punk Rock Big Year). With most printed mailers, the best-case scenario is having them sit atop the recycling pile, hopefully within sight of an art director’s desk for a few hours. Better yet, if you’re lucky someone might wad one up to use as a wedge for a wobbly chair leg, at least that way it’s in the office for a day or two. But with these things, I’ve actually had people call and email to say thanks! Imagine that, people actually getting in touch to express gratitude for a photography promotion! Even better, some folks who weren’t on the original list – and let’s face it, no mailing list is ever totally up to date – have called and emailed wondering where they might get one. Utterly without precedent, in my experience.

I’ve had a few questions about the project that I thought I would answer here today. First of all, no, we didn’t send out thousands of them. The delivery list was quite small and quite exclusive, in other words, highly targeted. Most mailing lists I see seem to have a lot of extraneous names on them; design interns, assistant photo researchers, receptionists, custodians… in other words, people who aren’t in a position to hire anyone. Some would argue that it’s all about building awareness of yourself as an artist-slash-brand, so the more people on the list the better, but I think that all you’re accomplishing most of the time is making people think of you as an artist-slash-irritant. If there’s one piece of advice I would offer here, a generalized rule for anyone wanting to do a mailer, it’s this; know your audience. Targeted promotions are always a better idea than just spraying paper all over the place and hoping someone will hire you. It took me a while to believe it, but I really think it’s true.

Secondly, yes, there were in fact two separate box designs, the original box photo that I posted was not two different elevations of the same box. Some eagle-eyed math whizzes noticed that there were in fact eight separate shots on my website and were curious as to why that was the case. The reasoning here was that different people in the same office would receive different boxes in the hopes of generating a bit of chatter and some more attention, a kind of “hey-that’s-not-the-box-i-got-let-me-see-that” effect. The jury’s still out on this, I haven’t actually heard of it happening but that’s not to say it hasn’t. Also it didn’t cost any extra for two different designs, so I figured, why not.

Thirdly, no, as far as I’m aware I haven’t gotten any work directly attributable to the boxes yet. However, it’s certainly gotten a lot of attention; the aforementioned phone calls and email messages, mentions and articles about the project on aphotoeditor, petapixel, noplasticsleeves and numerous smaller blogs and websites, and a huge bump in traffic to both Planet Shapton and my main portfolio site. And really, they’ve just gotten out there. The spring shooting season is just getting underway, we’ll see what happens..

All in all, by any metric I can think of, an unqualified success. And it’s got me thinking; what to do next? Planet Shapton shampoo, anyone?

Tune in next time for an exciting post about using a bizarre and finicky piece of equipment in a manner it was wholly unsuited for, and the epic post-production aftermath…

Ok, I admit it, I’m guilty. Guilty of polluting your offices with junk mail — analog spam, unsolicited and unwanted and in most cases probably tossed directly into the garbage and now sitting in a landfill somewhere. I’m talking about printed promotional mailers; postcards and folders and brochures and the like. As [...]]]>

Ok, I admit it, I’m guilty. Guilty of polluting your offices with junk mail — analog spam, unsolicited and unwanted and in most cases probably tossed directly into the garbage and now sitting in a landfill somewhere. I’m talking about printed promotional mailers; postcards and folders and brochures and the like. As a follow-up to my last post, I dug deeper into some of the boxes in my storeroom and unearthed an ungodly torrent of paper. And these are just the odds and ends and leftovers that weren’t sent. Most of it, thousands upon thousands of items, was mailed out or hand delivered to AD’s, CD’s and art buyers across the country and in the US. And then it all just disappeared. And I’m sorry.

I saw the error of my ways a few years ago, however — I quit the mass mailing habit cold turkey in 2007. Informal chats with clients and beer-fueled tête-à-têtes with other photographers seemed to indicate that printed mailers are an exercise in futility, vaguely distracting at best and downright irritating at worst. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that in most cases, mailing out promos offers pretty much the same return on investment as giving your money to the printer and paying him to set it on fire for you. Actually I think that scenario is probably a lot more efficient, and certainly less wasteful of time and natural resources.

Granted, whenever I visit a client or creative, there are usually a few mailers stuck to the wall or sitting on their desks — but there are generally a lot more of them in the garbage. And often as not, the stuff pinned up is either from photographers they’ve worked with before, or shooters who’ve recently won awards or garnered some attention elsewhere and are therefore already on their radar. As a supplement to self-branding, I suppose mailers have some nominal value, but I’ve found that juried annuals and awards shows are a much more effective way of getting noticed. And in all honesty, the Planet Shapton blog, combined with regular website updates, has been by far the most effective form of self-promotion I’ve ever tried.

However, here at the studio, discussions about mailers still abound. We’re encouraged to self-promote, of course, and printing a mailer is a quick and easy way to get something out the door. And of course, my fellow Westside associates are talented and well established, and regular award winners. We’re also the subjects and beneficiaries of an active and popular studio blog — in other words, we’re a known quantity and hence our promos are somewhat more likely to end up decorating someone’s office wall. It seems unfair, but there you go. Which brings me to the point of this post.

I had a meeting a few months ago with the studio partners, and when the subject of printed mailers came up, I politely expressed my views; I think my exact words were “Forget it. Not doing one. Waste of money. Too bad I can’t just print some shots on Kleenex, that way they’d at least be useful on their way to the garbage…” — and that was the Eureka moment. Yes, it’s true, I’ve done a promo – but not a mailer. I couldn’t find anyone who printed on Kleenex, but we came up with the next best thing…

The shots were conceived of and taken specifically for the tissue boxes — it was a hilarious and messy day of photos — and I consciously tried to do things a bit differently. I wanted the images to tie in conceptually with the promotion itself, which is something sadly lacking with most promo efforts, and I wanted to indulge in some careful studio lighting, something I’m not necessarily known for — you can see the full set of shots here. And last but not least, I loved the idea of an actual product, with some actual utility, that will hopefully linger for a while on people’s desks before being thrown out. Because let’s face it, that’s ultimately what’s going to happen.

They’re being sent out over the next few days, just in time for allergy season…

Special thanks to Erik Mohr, for the box layout and design, Kirsten White for producing the shoot, and Louise Griew for the snot-and-tears makeup effects. And of course, to the willing portrait subjects, good sports one and all!

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