As the latest ISM Briefing, Cute 22, is released, we have submerged ourselves in the sugariest, heart-meltingy, puppyesque ads we could find. And here are The Top 5

Why is this spread from our latest ISM Briefing Cute 22 so damn cute?

1. Its got Kittens, and they are staring, directly at you, through your eyes boring right down to that cute fleshy little pump thing we call a heart.

2. Look, the kittens are holding hands. Paws. They are best friends. If you find yourself lying down by your desk waiting to have your tummy tickled in an ecstasy of cute, just show your colleagues the picture.

3. The hammock factor. Let’s face it, who hasn’t at some point between the age of 2 and 8 fell in love with the hammock, with the idea of sleeping between the trees, outdoors, swaying, looking at the stars. The hammock is what beds dream of when they want to be cute.

And just to feed your Cute addiction here’s a cute video of a “Surprised Kitten.” What’s cute about a surprise kitty I hear you say. Join the other 61,576,309 viewers and find out.

For more on the latest ISM Briefing Cute 22 click here

“We might not dress as snappy as them, but I feel like there’s more interesting things going on this year,” Dave Droga of Droga5 tells Ad Age Editor Abbey Klaassen. There is a glamour to office life in Mad Men that you might expect to see reflected in business stock photos.

Indeed, TV companies over the last 18 months have sought to reproduce the Mad Men formula on an airline (Pan Am), in a club (Playboy Club) but these retro shows for various reasons haven’t caught the public imagination.

Droga suggests that may be we are in a new golden age of advertising, that the best of adverting may be in its future. This may be true, but what certainly is true that Droga’s clothes reflect the new world of business stock photos much better than the nostalgic world of Mad Men.

Image Source Business Stock Photos

If Mad Men reflects a corporate world, the fact is we are living in an age of small and medium size businesses, people setting up businesses at home, freelancing from hot spots in cafes, it’s a world with different codes and rituals expressed in the construction of business stock photos. Like Droga, the typical models are more informal, less stiff, being buttoned up is the price for looking sophisticated.

Image Source/ Blend : Business Stock Photos

While Mad Men may push our buttons, images of business life being used in advertising are much more diverse.

Image Source/ Blend Images

Why Cute? Baby videos, puppy videos, Volkswagen videos of kids dressed up as Darth Vader thinking they are using their power to talk with cars. Cute is the new international language of visual communication and Cute 22 tracks and analyses the imagery behind the trend that has sidled up to us like an impossible bundle of kitten love and wheedled its way into our affections.

Over the next 22 days be prepared to be tickled by cute. Resistance is futile.

Click here to Download ISM Briefing #3, “Cute 22”

Sunshine, the title of this documentary, captures the gentle irony of this movie by Partizan commercials and video director Doug Nichol about his longtime friend, producer John Benet.

The short movie has been featuring in festivals and Nichol has now post online. The relationship between the director and the subject encourages a kind of disarming honesty from Benet:

On Ads vs Movies

“A movie can’t be a bunch of images strung together, but an ad you can kind of get away with that.”

On having an Eye

“You can have a whole career in advertising and not be able to string a lot of thoughts together, if you have a great eye. That is key.”

Good? Bad? Crazy?

“Is this a good script or a bad script? I dunno it’s just a crazy script and for that reason I loved it.”

Filmmakers vs Hustlers

“Some directors are filmmakers, some are hustlers.”

And the title? To misquote Bill Withers, there ain’t no sunshine in this movie. More like sun-setting, which gives it a clarity and a poignancy. The title comes form those propaganda posters from Chairman Mao’s cultural reovolution where Mao is pictured in a red halo of sun. “Chairman Mao is the red sun in our minds” quotes Benet on the 1960s posters of heroic Chinese factory workers and farmers. But over 40 years later, Benet notes, “Instead of a hoe, they are holding a spicy chicken sandwich.”

Thanks Atlantic Magazine

For more sunny food images click on our extensive food stock photos collection

A full Helmut Newton retrospective is running at the Grand Palais in Paris from March 24 – June 17.  Fashion, nudes, Polaroids, fetish, the whole range of Newton’s work is on show. “Helmut always said, ‘I want to do everything forbidden, everything you don’t do,” curator Jérôme Neutres, told Vogue magazine. Neutres helped Newton’s widow June to organising the show.

Fashion trends this spring and summer are set to get deliciously garish and nostalgic. If designers and art directors are inspired by these seasonal fashion flicks, it’s likely beauty stock photos will be collaged and mashed. And expect some unusual referecne points for those using beauty stock as fashionm is looking back to simpler times, of ice-creams on the beach, space age hot-rods and VHS tapes.  It seems the influence of Mad Men rolls on.

1. Prada Cut Outs

Dreamy jazz collage from Prada. Created by AMO, the branding offshoot of the Rem Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Prada explains that, “AMO OMA explores the nostalgia of hot rodding, golfing, picnicking, the space race, and other wholesome past times.”  With driving jazz from Frédéric Sanchez, cut outs and VHS are in for summer 2012.

2. Lanvin Party

Snakes alive! The ghost of Guy Bourdin lives on.

3. L’Officiel Hommes magazine

Photographer Matthew Williams goes all split-screen in this promo for French Fashion Quarterly, L’Officiel Hommes.

4. Mulberry

To Play Video Click Through On Image

Brighton beach. The home of yellow wedges and giant melting ice-creams. Shot by Tim Walker and a soundtrack which is a laid back cover of Grace Jones’ Walking in the Rain.

5. Selfridges

Celebrating the launch of the Womens Designer Galleries at Selfridges, the London store commissioned a short film collection. This is Club Nouveau by Gareth Pugh, directed by Ruth Hogben.

For more beauty stock photos

Solipsism, the winner of the Special Jury Prize for Experimental Short at the 2012 Slamdance Film Festival is a complicated word for a visually inventive movie.

Made by film and commercials director Andrew Huang, Solipsism according to one philosophy dictionary means the belief that, “only I myself and my own experiences are real, while anything else – a physical object or another person – is nothing more than an object of my consciousness.” Just like a hangover then.

Huang, who has created commercials for Google and Toshiba raised the money on Kickstarter. Watch it and be amazed. Watch it again and be amazed that most of the special effects are staged not done in post-production.

Watch the Making Of below

At some point in the last couple of years those advertising male grooming and cosmetics products have looked at themselves in the mirror in the morning and seen…Well that’s hard to say exactly, after the bathroom surrealism of Isaiah Mustafa’s Old Spice man. What’s easy to say is that the image of Metrosexual man has fallen off the radar.

It seems that what men want is a bit of chaos, the mad bravado of Isaiah Mustafa’s jump cuts and now there’s “Mike” founder of dollarshaveclub.com who’s taken a leaf from Isaiah’s playbook – talk directly to camera; walk at camera so the viewer feels off balance; mock the advertising format by throwing in some stuff off camera.

“Mike” gets to have some fun with Gillette’s ads, boasting of his Tennis skills, and even takes aim at the sacred cow of shaving – the pavlovian response of the male psyche to new shavers with more blades, bigger blades, handles that vibrate,  shavers that buy you beer and laugh at your jokes (trust us, we’ve seen plans). “Real” men so the pitch goes, don’t need souped-up shavers to prove their masculinity. The ad also pokes fun at the digital entrepreneur’s bible of the moment The Lean Startup (look at the book in the hands of the man who’s head is being shaved) .

There was always debate about the extent to which Metrosexual Man was a marketing pitch more than a genuine descriptor of a shift in ideas around masculinity. Isaiah Mustafa and Mike are Mock-Jocks, amplifying male bravado so it becomes charmingly ridiculous, “Jocks” spun out, high on their own testosterone.

What isn’t in doubt is that in the age of viral, in a shave-off between Metrosexual Man and mad “Mike, there will only be one winner.

Click for male grooming images

1. Sugar Overload

The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas trades on a vibe of decadence and oddity with some notes of irony. This set of images manages to be both excessive and cute, the only Penthouse party with a sugar-high.

Agency: Fallon Minneapolis

Photography: Nadav Kander

2. Dirty Driving

The off-road Jeep experience is so real back-seat toddlers need goggles, helmet  and mountain boots. Spattered with mud Jeep-toddler removes his goggles to check everything is ok

Agency CumminsRoss Melbourne

Photographer Garry Moore

3. Old School Meets New School

Photographer Arthur Mebius announces his iPad portfolio with some shots from the dark room. Aanalog and digital at the same time, it’s a beautiful thing.

Image Source: Fitness Images

The shift in fitness images is also partly due to the success of Nike in redefining the sports image as a gritty, improvised, lofi art form. It’s no surprise that despite the fact that Nike aren’t an Olympic sponsor (Adidas spent £100 million) according to Brand Republic they are most associated in the public mind with the Olympics.

“Research on web buzz – carried out by BrandWatch, commissioned by digital agency Jam – from 1 December to 7 February, shows that Nike is dominating conversations on the internet, with 7.7% of the conversations about the Olympics associated with the brand.”

The landscape and backdrop of fitness images have shifted to the city, visualizing the jogger as urban rebel.

Image Source: Fitness Images

The wet towel flick image was created by JWT Halbye Kaag and photographed by Thomas Juul just at the moment of impact. Nice. The campaign by Jandl, a Slovakian Marketing and Communication specialist for an extreme sports company shows a man covered in honey jumping into a bear pit with the strapline, “There are easier ways to get your adrenaline fix.”

Meanwhile Euro RSCG have developed an interactive film for Peugeot, a kind of naked chase movie, called “Let Your Body Drive” featuring a man who has been cheating on his girlfriend. Peugeot invite the YouTube Viewer to “Help the hero to get out from the most embarassing situations… Will you make the right choice? Just one clue : Let Your Body Drive!” Is the Peugeot 208 a car for Women? Men? No-good, cheating heartbreakers? And who is the interactive aimed at?

With some pixellation and carefully placed lamps, the viewer is spared any blushes. And with nearly 2 million views since it was posted on YouTube by Peugeot on February 8 advertisers might keep an eye on the naked man trend, so to speak.

Follow the trend and prepare you next ad campaign with Rights Managed and Royalty Free images from Image Source

“Light’, a short movie by David Parker, aims to flag up  the mindless waste involved in leaving lights on. On the Sunday/Paper site (a collaboration between Parker and writer, advertising creative and film director Cole Schreiber) Parker explains, “Bleeding, crying lights were meant to metaphorically parallel the way in which we invisibly squander our natural resources without much thought. While the original sentiment remains, the film also grew into a poetic statement about a world run amok and the human tendency to exploit that which we hold dear.”

Occupying that spooky territory, of Gregory Crewdson and David Lynch where objects have a life of their own, the film cost $15k. Parker told The Atlantic magazine that the movie was inspired by designer Pieke Bergmans.

During January, the movie was looped in some screen in Times Square in January, and is currently on show at the Workshop in San Francisco.

Thanks to ISO50

The campaign that has set a tone for the family photograph in the UK was a recent one for Sainsbury’s supermarket.  With the UK economy still suffering the imagery’s downbeat optimism struck a chord with a nation tightening its belts, but perhaps going against the grain of more familiar family stock photos.

Image Source/RF Family Stock Photos

Inspired by the tone of the Sainsbury’s campaign, the series of images shot by photographer Daniel Pangbourne used a real family in a genuine family home in inner London. The chemistry between the participants is obvious, the Mum and boys are a real family while “dad” is a model “Dad” who works regularly with the family.

Image Source/RF Family Stock Photos

Shooting ads of families and family stock photos has never been more challenging. Consumers want to see imagery that registers something of their experience, but are not going to respond to downbeat images when considering where to go to buy cereal.

Image Source/RF Family Stock Photos

Daniel Pangbourne’s shoot, the models, the colour, the simple stories have an emotional warmth that is attractive in cold economic times.

To find out more about the thinking behind this shoot go to Image Source.com and click on Kitchen Shoots

Click For more Family Stock Photos

For everyone who asked for some Wallpapers from the popular Noo Emotions ISM Briefing 1, here they are in a variety of sizes for your different Noo Media! Crosstalgia, Hyperbelonging, Mangry and Melight. Discover more Noo Emotions and definitions in the Noo Emotions Briefing.

And keep an eye on IMSO over the next week for Wallpapers from our just released ISM 2 Briefing Superconnection.

Download ISM Briefing 1 Noo Emotions here, and ISM Briefing 2 Superconnection here

Wallpapers

Crosstalgia

“Crosstalgia – Deep anger that the present isn’t like the past made more annoying by the fact the past is all archived on the web”

Download Crosstalgia Wallpaper

Hyper Belonging

“Hyperbelonging – The intense feeling of warmth we get with online communities, particularly with loyal readers/followers of blogs.”

Download Hyper Belonging Wallpaper

Mangry

Mangry – fear of masculinity being threatened, expressed in rage. Mainly demonstrated online in the comments sections of newspaper articles.

Download Mangry Wallpaper

Melight

Melight – The rush of pleasure when seeing a surge of likes for your blog or posts.

Download Melight Wallpaper

For more high quality imagery go to imagesource.com

From the brief survey below, the Superconnection trend is currently the hot ticket in advertising. To download the ISM Briefing # 2 Superconnection Briefing click here

1. When you start trying to figure out your Facebook relationships by making a 3D infographic using mini-busts of yourself.

For more on Colin Pinegar’s Best Friends project click here

2. When the chain reaction of your Rube Goldberg machine promo actually works

3. When you can hear your dog talking to you

4.  When you can read between the lines and decode a newspaper ad for the UK’s spy agency MI6

5. When you yawn one morning and it becomes part of a viral, socially networked marketing campaign for a multinational coffee chain

To download the ISM Briefing # 2 Superconnection Briefing click here

With Burberry streaming their catwalk live to their website last year, the demands of London Fashion Week 2012  meant fashionistas would need to find a different set of boundaries to elegantly break through. In a partnership with CBS Outdoor who is also partnering the London 2012 Olympics this year, commuters on the Underground will be able to see all the behind-the-scenes action from Somerset House.

From clothes rails to tube rails, a dedicated photographer mercilessly dropped right in the thick fog of hairspray backstage, will transmit images to be broadcast to CBS Outdoor Cross-Track Projection screens across the London Underground.

Always an industry to push new boundaries with photography, technology and film, Fashion by definition has an eye on the future. Perhaps we’ll see a GIF or two and signals of the next colour that will define 2013.

You can track #LFW on this hashtag or visit http://www.londonfashionweek.co.uk/

In a world where technology is changing our lives on a daily basis, we’re creating new words and images to express new experiences and emotions – “OMG!,  “LOLZ, “Whatever.”

ISM Briefing #1, created by the Image Source Monitor (our Visual Intelligence Unit) playfully explores the new visual palette of emotions, and helpfully provides a unique dictionary/guide to the Noo Emotions of our times.

Click here and Download ISM Briefing #1

In 2012 we are living the trend of Superconnection. Not just the online life of tweeting, sharing pictures and liking, but in times of deep economic uncertainty we are seeking Superconnection at a much deeper level, desiring more from our everyday lives, whether its eating local foods, extending and exploring ourselves through personal passions and hobbies, or the phenomenon of searching out family history which has gone from late-middle age pastime to mainstream TV.

The fastest and deepest medium of Superconnection – as advertisers, magazine editors and Valentine’s lovers know – is the image. The image opens heart and mind, inspires thoughts and feelings, it’s the fast-lane of the imagination that enables us to Superconnect to new ideas. ISM Briefing #2 Superconnection explores the image world of Superconnection.

Go to Download ISM Briefing #2 Superconnection

Missed our first trend briefing? Check out ISM Briefing #1: Noo Emotions here

It’s easy to get lost looking through the Marsden Archive, the picture library owned by the late Simon Marsden. Partly because of the sheer number of dramatic landscapes, buildings and rooms, and partly because the longer you stare at the photos, the more you’re not quite sure what it is you are seeing.  Which was Simon Marsden’s vision as a photographer, as someone who was curious about the supernatural.

In the introduction to his picture library Marsden writes, “It is not my intention to try and convince you that ghosts exist, but rather to hopefully inspire you not to take everything around you at face value; to show that what we are conditioned to believe is ‘reality’ may not be quite all that it seems, if only we take the time to inquire.”

Marsden’s talent lay in his ability to make the viewer believe in the revealing power of the photograph, a talent recognized by the major galleries worldwide who showed his work, from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California to the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England.

2. Ground Magazine

3. Grae Magazine

IMSO: How did you get started in sports photography?

Dean Northcott: I had been shooting portrait photography for 12 years when I felt like a change and love sports so it was a natural progression. I had an idea for project/exhibition on sportsman which is on-going and that is driving my work.

IMSO: How has sport photography changed in the last decade or so?

Dean Northcott: It has become a lot more polished and highly produced/retouched with dramatic lighting.

Image Source: Dean Northcott.

IMSO: Are you shooting different kinds of sports now?

Dean Northcott: Yes but I love shots with action and drama.

IMSO: What is the most challenging sport to shoot and why?

Dean Northcott: Something like Judo or Wrestling is very hard to shoot as the athletes are often in very close contact with each other with their chins tucked in so you don’t pick up the emotion in the face.

IMSO: When you shoot athletes in action – running, both feet off the ground, or a tumbling diver, twisting in mid-air say – how do you do capture that decisive moment?

Dean Northcott: Get them to go through a series of their moves/actions shooting them with available light and then choose one that best serves your purpose. I love strong powerful actions and just follow my instinct on what talks to me. Then set up the lights to best capture the action/moment I have chosen and shoot it over and over until you get it. Technically, use a medium format camera at 1/500 and broncolor flash for the fast flash duration to fresh the moment.

IMSO: What kind of uses are there for a sport photo? Do you find that sport imagery is often used in a more abstract or metaphorical way – as a metaphor for teamwork or determination say?

Dean Northcott: As I shoot mainly Advertising, my sports work is nearly always directly for sports related clients. But Library work is more often than not use in the metaphor sense, especially around the time of major sporting events such as the Olympics.

Image Source: Dean Northcott.

IMSO: Are the people in your sports images generally real sportspeople? Or actors/models?

Dean Northcott: I always cast a rugby player for a rugby shoot and a tennis player for a tennis shoot. They can be models, actors or athletes, but they must show a high level of skill/technique in the sport I am shooting and have the right look. In sports photography, more than other areas, if you cast the wrong person it will stand out a mile!

IMSO: Is there any one sport that you have yet to shoot but would like to?

Dean Northcott: A beer-drinking, beach volleyball World Championship in the Maldives.

IMSO: What has been your best experience on a sports shoot? And the worst?

Dean Northcott: Being a huge rugby fan it was incredible buzz to have three of the English rugby team in the studio for an Ad shoot. I had them for three hours, which included travel time to and from Twickenham, wardrobe, make-up and shoot. With four shots to cover off this translated in to 15 mins per shot. Sometimes this works for you or against you, this time it worked for me with the energy generating some great shots. The worst experience would be driving from London to Birmingham three times in three weeks with two assistants and a load of rented gear in the car to shoot World Champion Triple Jumper Phillips Idowu for a personal project only to have to turn around and go back home due to bad weather, bad timing etc. with not a frame shot. Phillips is a lovely man giving me his own time and we are still discussing ways to make it happen.

Image Source: Dean Northcott.

IMSO: Who were your heroes in photography in general and sports photography in particular?

Dean Northcott: David LaChapelle, Gregory Crewdson

IMSO: And who are your sporting heroes?

Dean Northcott: Being a Kiwi it would be All Blacks, Christen Cullen, Zinzan Brooke and Richie MaCaw – Legends!! Also Muhammad Ali – pure magic!

IMSO: How much has sports photography been influenced by fashion?

Dean Northcott: All commercial photography is influenced by fashion these days. It is the only area in commercial photography were you are given true creative freedom.

Image Source: Dean Northcott.

IMSO: Bodies in sports imagery have become more sculpted, more sinuous, more anatomical, like illustrations from old medical textbooks? Why is this?

Dean Northcott: I don’t entirely agree with this statement. I think what has happened is that, as mentioned above, images have been more heavily retouched and merged with CGI to create an otherworldly feel with a polished look. This is happening because this is where the creative edge is at present.

For Dean Northcott’s photos on Image Source

For Dean Northcott’s own website

Image Source: Dean Northcott.

Sports Stock Photos are incredibly versatile for any kinds of comms, they express a range of hard-hitting ideas. Below are some of our top-selling concepts in our Sports Stock Photos collection

Willpower

[Image Source/Corbis RF Sports Stock Photos]

American Football may be a team game, but in the trenches it’s a series of individual battles that are an exercise in sheer will, standing toe-to-toe with your opposite number, no flinching. Popular in communications around Business Services (‘going the extra mile for you’) it visualizes the language of no-nonsense, never-give-an-inch, my-business-will succeed.  When the going gets tough, the tough stare you out.

Friendship

[Image Source/ Fancy Sports Stock Photos]

Strangely enough, the sport in which a Running Back crashing into you is the equivalent of getting hit with over 4,000 pounds of force, Football also signals close friendship. Go figure? It’s rituals around the game, hanging out, beer, snacks, it’s the language of shared experience, of time-out.  Just forget that the last hit on your team’s receiver was the physical equivalent of being hit by a bull.

Leadership

[Image Source/Corbis RF Sports Stock Photos]

Buried deep down in every middle-aged executive is a reflex that responds with warm nostalgia to the memory of high-school sports, and the Coach. In reality, coach may have been a coach with all the charisma of a burst football. In middle-aged memory, Coach was the Obi-Wan-Kenobi of sports psychology. In any case, the popularity of sporting metaphors in business seminars has made images of the Coach a winner for any business communications.

Generations

[Image Source/IS2 Sports Stock Photos]

Sport + Family = Legacy.  Images of parents playing sport with their kids pushes buttons for many businesses but if you’re in Financial Services, selling pensions, this is the sweet spot.

Cubist Snack Mash

Before Wallace and Gromit, before Chicken Run, Aardman animations made this surreal angular 1950s/Cubist mash for UK brand ‘Skips’

Dumb and Dumber

Doritos have an armlock on Superbowl snack visuals. Here’s the classic fortune-telling spot from 2009. Their ads outmuscle Diesel in the Stupid stakes.

80s Snack Stars

Current UK snack spot featuring two 80s icons Joan Collins and Stephanie Beacham.

Baby Snacks

Weird. But sometimes the truth is weird, like adults who sometimes behave like kids, and that strange man with the ping-pong ball head who’s always in restaurant kitchens? Or am I just imagining it.

What’s This Ad For?

Effective frequency. How many times do we need to be exposed to a piece of advertising before we get the message. Stewie and Brian from Family Guy argue. What was it they’re selling?

Hungry for Snack Food Photos?

Twitter’s new ad is as self-conscious as last year’s widely criticised ad, it’s first commercial which nodded to the New York earthquake, but has a thumbs up so far for its hammy parody of over-enthusiastic tech company employees. It’s hammy and innocent, innocence being a defining characteristic of the Geek (see Steve Carrell in The 40 Year Old Virgin). The Geek is an emerging visual archetype in the categories of Man Stock Photos and Woman Stock Photos

But it also highlights just how far Geek Culture, which was a subculture, has entered the mainstream. The ‘geek’ has often been pictured as a figure of fun – socially inept, hopeless, helpless – that borders on bullying. Long before ‘geeks’ turned out to be the ones ruling the new digital world (from Bill Gates to…..) the Geek had been reborn as a subtler kind of cool by Hollywood from George McFly in Back to the Future, to David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) in Independence Day, to Thora Birch in Ghost World a kind of breakthrough for the Modern Geek Girl.

These movies picture Geek as truly cool because they know they’re not cool and don’t care. They are happy. And so curiously in advertising, the ‘Geek’ has become the sign of non-conformity, with Microsoft’s ‘I am a PC’ impassioned defence against being stereotyped in the Apple ads (Cool versus Geek).

In 2012 the image of Geek sits perfectly with our economic uncertainty, of mild protest, of generalized dissatisfaction. Like the Geek we are all outsiders now, afloat in a sea of uncertainty, thrown back on our own resources. The Geek is partly defined by the unrecognised creative talent to fabricate a rich universe of the imagination, like Wayne’s World, or Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon in 30 Rock who was described by Time magazine as Goddess of Geeks.

Huffington Post recently ran a feature 7 Signs Geek Girls Are Taking Over The World, which underlines the fact that ‘Geek’ was once largely male (see Manstock) is no longer gender specific.

Check into IMSO this week for further explorations of the hot new trend beyond Man Stock Photos and, Women Stock Photos – Geek Stock Photos.

Meanwhile what are your favorite Geek movies and characters? Here’s a benchmark movie that ticks off all the attributes (we’re geeks too we’ve counted) of the great geek movie

1. Lucky Peach

A dead fish dribbling blood, crossed out coverlines and the handmade typefaces on the deconstructed cover tell you all you need to know about Lucky Peach food magazine. It was called the best new food magazine of 2011 by The Atlantic, The team behind this magazine are David Chang, chef/owner of Momofuku the punk noodle hostelry, writer Peter Meehan, and Zero Point Zero Production who produced the Emmy Award–winning “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations.” The New York Times says of the design that,”Some of the graphics look as if they were conjured in a tattoo parlor — rugged, expressive and streetwise, with a gallery of the pantheon of ramen heroes rendered in black-and-white woodcut.”

2. Yummy

Any food magazine obsessive enough to offer a Frankfurter Font deserves respect, support, and a side order of onion rings. Yummy is a french magazine celebrating fast food. Magculture’s Jeremy Leslie summarises the contents of issue 3 as, “collections of food packaging from Bangkok, exposes of rock bands’ rider requests, an illustrated essay on puking and plenty of visual puns (finger food, anyone?). Oh, and plenty of breasts.” To see their Frankfurter font click here and go to Fake’n Food Font. Not clear whether it is still publishing, so if any of you have heard any recent news let us know,

3. The Art of Eating

The Art of Eating has been described by The Wall Street Journal as “Arguably America’s most erudite and prestigious food publication.”  Published by American Food writer Edward Behr it carries no advertsing. The editor’s not on the magazine website says, “Along with in-depth articles, there are recipes, letters, a wine review (“Why This Bottle, Really?”), restaurant reviews, book reviews plus, according to the subject, addresses for exceptional open-air markets, individual growers and craftsmen, bakers, cheesemakers, wineries, olive-oil mills, charcutiers, chocolatiers, or restaurants (from haute cuisine to very simple).”

4. Condiment Magazine

Based in Melbourne Australia, Condiment Magazine is subtitled Adventures in Food and Form is another magazine causing a stir because of its attention to visuals. It’s website declares manifesto style, “ as its masters we think: food is here to serve us. But quite possibly: we are here to serve food.  Reversing the roles and giving up control is an eye-opening exercise. After all it is we who are dependent on food, and not food that is dependent on us.”

5. Meatpaper

Meatpaper magazine is a quarterly San Francisco-based magazine covering all aspects of meat culture (our IMSO carnivores were happy to discover there was a meat ‘culture’). Though don’t expect too many recipes. Its co founder, Editor-In-Chief and Art Director Sasha Wizansky is also a graphic designer which clearly shapes the magazine’s unique perspective on food. To give you a flavour the blrub around issue 13 says,“Meat paper offer stories about a variety of meats, including python, locusts, tripe, beef tongue, porcupine, dog, and jailhouse meat. We also share true stories of the people who make their living from meat, from Utah to northernmost Vermont.”

In in an interview with Colophon, Meatpaper explain their remit: “We document the fleischgeist, our term for the idea of meat and the current meat movement. The fleischgeist is international in scope and encompasses consumers’ new curiosity about where meat comes from, artists who create meat-related artwork, and many other interdisciplinary elements.”

For prime cuts of imagery and other tasty morsels try our food stock photos section

David Cleveland shoots people, interiors, and still life with a crisp and cool sense of space, but what makes us salivate here on IMSO are his food photos. Food photos that make food look not just ‘tasty’ but desirable: food that looks scrumptiously edible: food images that are sculptural and graphic; and food images that tell stories of picnics, family dinners and candlelit romances. David Cleveland is an expert at capturing taste, mood and the iconic beauty of food. It’s a fascinating art.

With the food revolution over the last decade, the language of food stock pictures have changed as tastes in food and dining styles have become increasingly fluid. In its cycles and tastes, food has become more like fashion and food stock photos, which aim to capture the essential visual elements of a style or fashion, have recognisably shifted – colour, lighting, context.

Image Source: David Cleveland. Food Stock Photos and Interior Design

Looking at Cleveland’s interiors work for clients such as Elle Decoration, Harrods Magazine and Easy Living, you can see how it crosses over into his approach to food with arrangements and colour selection that makes food a culturally ‘tasteful’ object as much as it is appealing. In its composition, colour and arrangement it’s, something you want to decorate your table, as much as eat it. Browsing through his work on Image Source, his current work also ticks off a number of associated trends linking food with medicine and cosmetics, where certain kinds of food takes on a slightly different ‘image’ and context.

Image Source: David Cleveland Food Stock Photos as Beauty

IMSO: Can you tell us a little about your background, how you became a photographer, what was your training?

David Cleveland: 12 years ago I was working in an office for a shop in the Burlington Arcade and the company’s photographer who I was friends with, used come in to say I was wasted on that job as it was obvious to him I had a creative leaning. He forced me to go and assist him and the rest they say is history I guess?

IMSO: When did you decide to explore the genre of food photography?

David Cleveland: About three years into my assisting career (assisting interiors and still life photographers) which lasted for 5 years, I realised that so much of the work I was building up in my spare time for my portfolio was either still life, interiors or food so it was a genre that I just naturally felt comfortable doing really – put it this way I never wanted do do fashion?? A plate of food doesn’t talk back to you…well, it shouldn’t do?

Image Source: David Cleveland. Tactile Food Stock Photos

IMSO: Who were your heroes in Food images – photographers, painters, film-makers etc?

David Cleveland: As far as ‘foodie’ photogs go  – Mikkel Vang, Con Poulos and David Loftus. Why? Because they just make it look so effortless!

IMSO: How has Food photography changed in the last decade or so?

David Cleveland: I think the most obvious differences are that things are far more naturally lit and not as styled as they used to be. If I think back to my mum’s Robert Carrier books from the 1980s it was all overlit with tungsten light much of the time and each dish would be surrounded by all the raw ingredients that were used to make up the dish – in short, horrific!

Image Source: David Cleveland. Intense Color Contrast

IMSO: How important is context and ambience?

David Cleveland: Well it really depends on the job in hand and the brief from the client. Both are important but I think ambience is all-important and each photographer (in any field) is hired on the basis of the ambience they can achieve with his or her style.

Image Source: David Cleveland. The Geometry of Food

IMSO: The bright Mediterranean look was in fashion a while back, the trend seems a bit cooler now?

David Cleveland: Yes things are far cooler and more natural now – after all, this is England! People won’t be able to relate if it seems everything was shot in Santorini!?

IMSO: What is the most challenging food to shoot and why?

David Cleveland: Ice Cream, for obvious reasons or fizzy drinks – difficult to freeze-frame those bubbles you see so they end up looking flat!

IMSO: What kinds of uses are there for a food photo? For example, a family meal or people preparing a meal expresses ‘togetherness’, a couple sharing dinner signals ‘intimacy’, ‘pleasure’, what advertising sectors beyond ‘food’ has your work been shown?

David Cleveland: My work gets shown all over the place, especially the stock imagery. I think that food imagery can mean anything used in different contexts alongside different headlines and copy. I have had an image of a massive yummy cake used by a huge bank in their annual report before??

Image Source: David Cleveland. Cake design

IMSO: Are you shooting different kinds of food now?

David Cleveland: I shoot food for quite a few restaurants so it is incredibly varied what sorts of food I shoot from day to day.

IMSO: What has been your best experience on a food shoot?

David Cleveland: Best – Shooting the new afternoon tea menu for the Berkeley Hotel was pretty special – beautifully presented and particularly tasty! Worst – I suppose going to a pretty sleazy hotel in Slough and being asked to photograph a hamburger that had been cooked from frozen wasn’t a ‘career high’. I’ve had to shoot a kebab before with all the sauce on – take it from me it is impossible to make those things look good, let alone edible. ‘Each to their own’ I suppose!?

Image Source: David Cleveland. The classic Afternoon Tea

IMSO: Styled food is usually inedible and discarded after a shoot, but have you ever known someone to eat the styled food by accident?

David Cleveland:Yes…me! Sometimes it is very easy to forget that it isn’t for you to eat, it’s a primal instinct I think. Also, if you need to omit something from a shot and you are at that ‘critical moment’ and can’t move from behind the camera then your mouth is as good a place than any to discard the morsel!

IMSO: What’s your favourite food book?

David Cleveland: Mad Hungry by Lucinda Scala Quinn Photography by Mikel Vang – not exactly slimming but some scrumptious recipes in there!

IMSO: Is there any one food image that you would love to have the opportunity to take?

David Cleveland: Not really I’m happy with my lot so far. I would like to help Bill Granger out when he shoots his book in Oz by the sea…yes that would be nice!

IMSO: Photographer Lucas Allen shot an 8-page spread for Everyday Food magazine using the Hipstamatic app on his iPhone. Is this something you would consider, or a trend you see spreading?

David Cleveland: I think that the camera phone is an amazing and versatile thing and is superb for blog entries etc however I can’t see it necessarily becoming a prevalent tool for the higher end stuff? But like I say if this is what your client wants then I’d be happy to give it a go – it would save me from bringing ‘mountains of kit’ to the shoot wouldn’t it, so I’m in!

Image Source: David Cleveland. Food iconography

View David Clevelands Blog here:  http://davidcleveland.blogspot.com/

View his collection of food stock photos at Image Source here http://www.imagesource.com/photographer/DavidCleveland

The original banana was a sticker that couod be unpeeled form the cover. The Hollywood Reporter says that “Stories about how the idea came about vary. In one version, a French singer named Antoine came to New York and was greeted by Nico holding a bunch of bananas. Warhol would later photograph the singer. In another version – the one given in the complaint – Warhol designed the image after the group shared a $3,000 advance.”

The band argue that the specific banana is associated in the public mind with the album and the band. Is it a case of sour grapes? A rock’n’roll icon going pear-shaped? We’ll find out soon, as the trial will take place in the Big Apple.

Image Source photos have the legal clearances for any fruit your band would like for its album cover. Try our Food Stock Photos

‘I see no reason to not make a self-portrait each day,’ the photographer says. ‘I’m always around and always free. It’s kind of like going to the gym – it flexes your muscles and keeps you in shape.’

Jeff Harris has taken a self-portrait everyday for the past twelve years – that’s 4,748 self-portraits and counting.

When I first came across the video, produced for Time Magazine lightbox, I assumed it was merely like the famous viral Noah takes a photo of himself everyday for six years, and similar projects, but it’s far more impressive. ‘I didn’t want 365 images of me sitting on the couch each day’, said Harris to Time Magazine.

The photos, taken by Harris with an Olympic Stylus 35mm film camera (he’s gone through six), document his battle with cancer, encounters with celebrities (he has them take his portrait), highs and lows – a life well lived.

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The Photorito is a protective lens wrap that looks like a burrito. Why a burrito, you ask? Well… why not?

The faux-tortilla wrap is ‘made of super-tough Tyvek (the stuff hazmat suits are made of) and cushioned with neoprene.’ Made by Photojojo, whose headquarters are located in the ‘Burrito Capital of San Francisco’, they explain on their site ‘you know your lens will be safe even if you drop your bag off a cliff, get attacked by a pack of wild honey badgers, or get bored and need something to toss around. Plus, a clever burrito disguise means potential thieves will never suspect that you’re packing glass instead of pico de gallo.’ (But what if the thieves are looking to steal Mexican food?)

Photojojo are selling the Photorito for twenty dollars through their site. Mouth-watering?

Via Photojojo.

Looking at the food stock photos from Image Source might also make your mouth water.

A health insurance company in Germany are promoting their non-smoking initiative with a clever calendar communicating the positive effects of quitting smoking for one year…

For many people, the beginning of a new year means New Year’s resolutions – a recent study found that ninety-five per cent of Britons will endeavour to keep some sort of resolution – and top of many lists will be a vow to quit smoking.

AOK, a health insurance company in Germany, are promoting their non-smoking initiative with the Nichtraucher-kalender, a calendar communicating the positive effects of quitting smoking for one year. Each month the typographic art calendar shows a black pair of smoker’s lungs. Using an innovative laser technology, the lungs have a filigree pattern cut out of them, with the underlying pages also visible. As the pages are removed, the lungs become lighter and lighter until, in December, the lungs are almost clear.

Via The Inspiration Room.

Looking at the well being stock photos from Image Source might also inspire some positive lifestyle changes.

A concept bicycle that doubles as a camera tripod…

The T-Bike is a concept bicycle by designer Reza Rachmat Sumirat inspired by the camera tripod. The bike has three sliding bars that can be adjusted to the rider’s preferences, and also doubles as a tripod for active outdoor photography. The handlebars provide a tripod mount, and the kickstand on the front wheels helps stabilise the shot.

I think it’s an interesting idea, but with those tiny wheels it looks like a circus clown bike – you might be better off rigging a tripod across the handlebars of your own normal-sized bike (which you would have to do – it’s only a concept design after all). But what do you think?

Via PetaPixel.

Take a ganders at transport stock photos from Image Source.

New cameras with new modes: photograph a sleeping person without rousing them from their slumber, or give a friend a digital nip/tuck…

Canon’s new line of ELPH cameras have a Sleeping Face Recognition mode that turns off the flash, assist beam and sounds when it detects that you’re attempting to photograph someone sleeping. As you do. Arguably worth having, as one among many modes, but perhaps the kind of gimmick better left to an iPhone app.

Olympus’ new VR-340 has a Beauty Make-Up Mode that offers eighteen in-camera ‘enhancements’. If you know someone, a friend, say, who is somewhat … unprepossessing … you can do them a favour by whitening their teeth, shrinking their double chin or erasing the bags under their eyes with your digitised make-up and plastic surgery kit.

Via PetaPixel.

Historical revisionism with Photoshop. Two projects – one funny, the other serious – digitally remove the subjects of iconic images…

Jean-Marie Delbes and Hatim el Hihi have digitally removed dead band members from famous album covers for a project called LIVE! – Abbey Road without John and George, Tommy Ramone cutting a lonely figure for the Ramones’ self-titled debut album. Funny yet strangely sad – ‘rock and roll’ stars die young, researchers have proved it – and a demonstration of virtuoso Photoshop skills.

The Ramones, The Ramones.

Return to the 36 Chambers, Ol’ Dirty Bastard.

A project also concerned with digital erasure, visual artist Pavel Maria Smjkal has removed the subjects from iconic photographs. With his project Fatescapes, Smjkal forces us to question the veracity of historical images and the photojournalist’s role, their images more trusted in a pre-Photoshop era as accurate representations of reality.

CREDIT: Pavel Maria Smjkal. Beijing. Without the Tank Man, or the advancing column of tanks.

‘Using a simple Photoshop tool, Mr. Smejkal has reshaped these images and challenged us to confront the relationship of photographer, image and history in a manner that is profoundly unsettling’, wrote the New York Times. ‘Viewing Fatescapes encourages you to wonder if it even matters whether Mr. Adams’s general was misrepresented (a claim made by the photographer) or if Mr. Capa’s photo was not what it purported to be.’

On the Photoshop note, Jesse Rosten’s soon-to-be viral spoof cosmetics ad takes aim at the questionable claims of beauty products.

(Via Design Taxi, here and here)

The stock images from Image Source have only the most tasteful Photoshopping.

Year of the Glitch is a 366 day project by Phillip Stearns collecting various instances of glitches, intentional or otherwise, produced by electronic systems – digital cameras, camcorders, electronic displays and scanners on the fritz, as well as manipulated or corrupted files. The project is part of the glitch art ‘movement’, which finds beauty in the blockiness and crystaline fragmention of digital errors.

On the Year of the Glitch site, the Brooklyn-based Stearns quotes from an essay by academic Hugh S. Manon and artist Daniel Temkin. ‘What makes good glitch art good is that, amidst a seemingly endless flood of images, it maintains a sense of the wilderness within the computer’. An interesting read, if words like ‘ontology’ and ‘liminal’ don’t make you feel dizzy.

According to Manon and Temkin, glitch art has important precursors such as Nam June Paik, John Cage, and Anni Albers, and proto-glitch artists include Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter. And yet, they argue, ‘glitch art was not born in any particular location or moment’. It was ‘discovered (and continues to be discovered) at a thousand points simultaneously. The nascent glitch artist is seduced by a chance encounter: one witnesses, perhaps for the first time, the momentary failure of a digitally transcoded text—a fractured JPEG image, for instance, or a compressed video file losing traction with itself. The error is perceived as provocative, strange and beautiful.’ What do you think? Provocative, strange and beautiful? Or time to get your camera repaired?

Via PetaPixel.

CREDIT: Phillip Stearns

CREDIT: Phillip Stearns

The stock photos from Image Source have no glitches.

Polaboys, made by the German company Lightboys, are enlarged Polaroids to a scale of 10:1. The authentically washed-out-looking Polaroid image is backlit by LEDs and mounted in a silver wooden frame.

A limited edition run of Polaboys come with a print included, by artists such as professional skateborder/artist Ed Templeton and fashion photographer Terry Richardson. The prints are being sold through French shop Colette, and the print/frame combination costs up to $6500. But you can also use your own art. Send Lightboys either a print or a digital file, and they’ll print the image and send you a Polaboy for $3000.

PopPhoto.com suggest the Polaboy is probably something you could knock up yourself for a much lower price. All you would need to do is pick up a large LED-powered backlight and get your image printed on a sufficiently large transparency. ‘It might not be quite as slick, but it would be remarkably affordable, and have a DIY aesthetic that any true lomographer would love.’

The ‘Polaroid Look’ has set the benchmark for authenticity in photography. The Image Source Monitor team set out to indentify the rules for authentic imagery, the Art Of Realism. An exponent of the authentic ‘Polaroidal’ look is the fStop, a brand represented by Image Source. View the collection here.

President Barack Obama has joined the insanely popular photo sharing site Instagram, a favourite of Hipsters. The first uploaded picture, posted by the U.S. President’s staff, shows Obama video-conferencing with supporters at the Iowa caucus.

The Instagram app allows the user – in this case the leader of the free world (or his staff) – to apply retro filters that make the image look like it was taken with an antique camera. The photos can then be instantly posted to the user’s Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter accounts. Obama has been called everything from the Facebook President (he was the first POTUS to join the social network) to the YouTube President (when he came to office Obama began posting weekly ‘fireside’ chats on his YouTube channel). Now with Instagram, people are calling Obama the Hipster President.

In the short time the Instagram account (@barackobama) has been live Obama has posted six images, and amassed over 50,000 followers, though he isn’t following anyone (think of all the retro images of cats he’s missing out on).

The Daily Mail newspaper have ‘used the popular iPhone app’ (I think that’s a bit of a fib; they probably used Photoshop) to ‘give a vintage look to some favourite White House moments’. The writer enthuses about the Instagram treatment, the distinctly hazy Sixties and Seventies feel to the images, and how relatively ordinary moments seem more important, almost like historical documents. Imagine if you gave extraordinary moments the Instagram treatment. How important would they seem then?

One of our twelve predictions for 2012 (rendered in twenty words) was that, with the Presidential election dominating the news cycle, images of political figures and Americana – stars and stripes, bald eagles etc. – are inescapable. We stand by the prediction, though we didn’t expect the images to be quite so hazy.

And for super-sharp, non-retro images of political figures, look no further than our politics stock photos.

Papermag magazine highlight the power of the photo to inspire generosity, with their story on photographer Richard Phibbs who has shot a photoset of glamorous ‘Supermodel’ animals for The Humane Society of New York.

They’re not really A-List, celebrity cats and dogs (and a bunny rabbit!),  just ordinary animals down on their luck, needing adoption by humans. So why go to the trouble of shooting them in bow-ties, flat-caps and neckerchiefs?

The inspiration for this photoshoot, according to Papermag’s Elizabeth Thompson, began in September with an item on CBS news about Dallas photographer Teresa Berg who gives her skills to animal shelters after discovering that badly shot, badly lit images of animals in their cages made it difficult for these animals to find homes.  When Berg shot some cool images, adoptions went up 100%

The team at Papermag drew Richard Phibbs’ attention to the story and before you could say “Cute Shoot”, the portraits were done, and are up on the The Humane Society of New York’s Facebook page.

Anyone needing a story full of the spirit of Christmas should have a look at the Humane Society’s website who do inspirational work all the year round: from providing affordable veterinary care for dog and cat owners who would otherwise be stuck; through to an adoption service; and to providing broader social functions, they recently welcomed visitors from Tuesday’s Children, an organization reaching out to children who lost parents on 9/11.

Meanwhile anyone interested in providing a good home for any of the pets featured on the facebook page just click on the link to petfinder at the bottom of the portrait.

Woof!

For more info on The Humane Society of New York

The company behind the popular Hipstamatic camera app, Synthetic Corp, has unveiled a new app that simulates the one-use disposable camera with a 24-exposure ‘digital roll of film’.

The new D-series allows a group of friends to share the same virtual roll of film. The first user selects the camera and invites friends to join. Invited photographers shoot with the app, each user seeing a shared shot count. Once all the exposures on the roll have been used, then, and only then, can invited users see the photos. A fun idea, no? A shared experience, and one that replicates the sense of surprise and delight you had in a pre-digital era of getting, all in one go, your holiday or party snaps back from the shop developed.

Holidays and parties were my first thought, but Mashable have a more left-field take on the new app: its potential use in documenting protests. ‘Let’s say you’re at a public rally you expect to get hot. You have a few friends on the ground, but want to make sure no matter what happens all of your photos make it out …  if you have your iPhone taken away or lose it, the photos are still safe.’

The Hipstamatic D-Series app is free, and available to download now.

Promo video by Synthetic

The lyrics of O Tannenbaum, a traditional German carol, begin as such (according to at least one translation): ‘O Christmas Tree! O Christmas Tree! Thy leaves are so unchanging’. I’ll have you know, O Christmas tree, thy leaves are very easily changed. In festive advertising campaigns, some from this holiday season, others from Christmas past, companies are making yuletide trees out of bottles, barrels, French fries, electronics – the list goes on. Here are a selection, in video and print.

This holiday season…

Heineken’s Social Tree

The first initiative of Heineken’s recently announced global partnership with Facebook, Heineken Singapore turns the traditional Christmas tree into a social tree. The tree, consisting of 48 LCD screens, allows Facebookers to send a message to their family and friends.

Jack Daniel’s Barrel Tree

Jack Daniels is promoting its Holiday Select whisky with an integrated advertising campaign Holiday Barrel Tree. 187 white oak barrels from the company’s distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee are used to construct a giant Christmas tree.

Lego’s Lego Tree

Toymaker Lego has erected a 12.2 metre high Christmas tree made from 600,000 bricks at St. Pancras railway station. Read more about the lego tree here.

Comet’s Electronics Tree

Electronics retailer Comet have been highlighting in their recent campaign their remaining advantage over online retailers – personal service and getting your hands on the gadget before you buy (their slogan is ‘come and play at Comet’), In this festive advert Comet have some staff make a Christmas tree from electronics.

Christmas past…

Grolsch’s Bottle Tree

In 2010, lager Grolsch and the Swingtop Philharmonic Orchestra presented a ‘video Christmas card’ featuring a rendition of the carol ‘O Christmas Tree’ played exclusively on instruments made from Grolsch Swingtop bottles. The festive Grolsch ‘glockenspiel’ is revealed, at the end of the spot, as a Christmas tree made from Grolsch bottles.

Apple’s Earphone Tree

iPhone Christmas print ad designed by Kyle Rey.

McDonald’s Fry Tree

Print ad by TBWA\Neboko (advertising agency for McDonald’s in the Netherlands), released in 2008.

CreAd’s Pencil Tree

By and for advertising agency CreAds, Singapore.

Mercedes-Benz’s Tyre Tree

Print ad by Daimler AG, released in 2007.

Tide’s Ink Tree

Laundry detergent Tide wishes you a white Christmas.

The New Zealand branch of Turtle Beach, maker of gaming audio headsets, have teamed up with advertising agency Droga5 to send an experienced Kiwi gamer to a real war zone in Iraq. The project ostensibly has something to do with Turtle Beach’s headsets offering a ‘real’ audio experience. The ‘mission’ was filmed and turned into a series of videos, set to be launched on YouTube.

Where to start? Adverblog question whether the project is on shaky moral ground, ‘leveraging a real-life tragedy for commercial gain’? Gaming site The Escapist is more concerned about the gamer’s safety, observing that ‘many Western governments advise against travel to this part of the world unless it’s absolutely essential.’ All fine points, but disregarding questions of taste and safety, will this project actually appeal to gamers?

Ben Ward, Turtle Beach spokesperson, said, ‘Gamers play in virtual warzones every day and night, and they want the immersive feeling of combat so we thought we’d take that experience one step further.’ Surely this understates the escapism, the vicarious thrill of gaming? The Escapist ask, ‘Did they envision gamers responding to Phil (the gamer) going to Kurdistan with awe, saying things like ‘It just got real!’ and getting excited?’

If you have Photoshop, you can make a lovely animated GIF, using your own pictures (a Christmas tree, you wearing a Santa hat, whatever you like), that will convey your personal message of Christmas cheer to your friends and family.

Super-cool Cinemagraphs, one of our big trends in photography this year, have given the humble GIF a new lease of life. And so in the spirit of Christmas giving, we’ve created a simple four-step tutorial, explaining how you can make your own animated GIFs using Photoshop.

Here’s one we made earlier:

Step 1: Set up your layers

First you need to build a layered Photoshop file with all the elements you plan to animate. The example GIF has 7 layers (1 image layer and 6 text layers). The message we’re using is Merry Gif-mas from Image Source *, and we’re having each word pop up, one at a time.

So open your image, then add the text a word at a time in individual text boxes (e.g. Merry … Gif-mass … from … etc.).

Step 2: Create frames in Animation palette

Find the Animation palette by going to:
Photoshop Menu > Windows > Animation (you may need to click Show All Menu Items)

On the first frame, turn off all the layers except the layer you want visible at the start of the animation (you turn layers on and off by clicking the eye icon). Then add one frame at a time, and turn on the layers you want visible for each step (e.g. just the image and ‘merry’, just the image and ‘gif-mass’ etc.).

Bonus Tip: If you want to smooth the transition between frames you can use the Tween function to add extra frames. You can find the Tween button at the bottom of the Animation palette (the diagonal disappearing dots).

Step 3: Adjust your animation speed

When you finish setting up the frames, you can adjust the amount of delay between them. You can change the timing from the pop-up menu or choose Other… and specify a different time. Using the play button, you can test how it works and adjust the timing accordingly.

Step 4: Export as Animated GIF file

Save your Photoshop file first, and then export your animated GIF.

From the Photoshop menu go: File > Save For Web & Devices…

Make sure the image type is set to GIF. Play around with any options if you want, and then save your file.

Done! To test your fantastic animated GIF, open the file in your web browser.

To see the GIFs you can make with Image Source stock photos visit our Gifshop, where you can share and download over 40 free festive GIFs. Visit the Gifshop here.

Have a Merry Gif-mas!

Produced by The New York Times Magazine and directed by Alex Prager, Touch of Evil is a fun series of video portraits of ‘the best performers from the year in film’ channelling icons of cinematic villainy; Michael Shannon (Boardwalk Empire) impersonates Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, Viola Davis (The Help) dons the eerily pristine uniform of Nurse Ratchet from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Rooney Mara (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) portrays the psychopathic Alex from A Clockwork Orange, alongside Gary Oldman, Ryan Gosling and others.

The Touch of Evil gallery follows a recent spread in Harper’s Bazaar in which a handful of actors who have worked with director Martin Scorsese recreated memorable scenes from his iconic films. The most talked about was Chloe Moretz (Hugo) taking on the role of the teenage prostitute made famous by Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver.

Peter Bogdanovich, director of The Last Picture Show and champion of old Hollywood, lamented the vanished studio system in an interview with the Guardian. There are no stars any longer in Hollywood, he complained. What about Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks? asked the interviewer. Bogdanovich replied ‘They don’t have personalities, so they can’t be stars. Do me a Tom Cruise impression, do me a Tom Hanks impression.’ Bogdanovich was comparing this generation of stars, unfavourably, with ‘golden age’ actors like Cary Grant and John Wayne who had the same persona from one role to the next, making no attempt to be ‘chameleonic’. They were true icons.

But could you go even further and say that our current crop of movie stars lack the iconic status of actors from even thirty years ago? They’re playing dress-up, recreating iconic roles, basking in the refracted glow of old movies and old stars. Time will tell. It is quite possible that in thirty years a new breed of actors will be impersonating Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will be Blood or Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network or whatever roles and films have lasted, passing into the pantheon.

The outlandish and exuberant film director Ken Russell died last week. Before turning to film he forged a career as a photographer. This started me thinking about other photographers turned filmmakers. Can you see in their photography intimations of the filmmakers they would become? Do their films betray a ‘photographer’s eye’? And would we be talking about their photography if they were not also renowned film directors?

Visionary film director Ken Russell, whose films included The Devils and Tommy, died last week aged 84. Before he became Britain’s most outlandish director, he forged a career as a photographer, capturing British eccentricity and a nascent youth culture. He started working as a freelancer in 1951, aged 23, wandering the streets of London’s Notting Hill until ‘something caught (his) eye’.

Sean O’Hagan in The Guardian has said that he much prefers Russell’s photographs. ‘Something about the medium reined in his excesses, made him a more thoughtful observer of the everyday and the eccentric.’ His early photography hints at the surrealism of his later films – take for example this photograph of dancer Frances Pidgeon wearing a ‘hip bath’ on her back like a tortoise shell, only her legs and arms protruding – but the style is more restrained and observational.

CREDIT: Ken Russell

This started me thinking about other photographers turned filmmakers. Can you see in their photography intimations of the filmmakers they would become? Do their films betray a ‘photographer’s eye’? And would we be talking about their photography if they were not also renowned film directors?

Stanley Kubrick was an avowed fan of Russell’s work (preparing Barry Lyndon in the early 1970s, Kubrick called Russell to ask him where he had found the locations for his period films), and they both started out as photographers. Before he turned to film, Kubrick was prowling 1940s New York, photographing wannabe showgirls, boxers and down-and-outs, mostly for Look magazine (at the age of 17 he became the youngest staff photographer in their history).

CREDIT: Stanley Kubrick

There is continuity between Kubrick’s early photography and his mature cinematic oeuvre: an interest in the underside of life and, more specifically, boxing (Kubrick’s first film, a short documentary, followed middleweight Irish boxer Walter Cartier, and was based on a series Kubrick shot for Look in 1949 called Prizefighter). His photographs, collected in the book Stanley Kubrick, Drama and Shadows, show that even at an early age Kubrick had a good eye, and he later emphasised the importance of his training in photography, saying ‘To make a film entirely by yourself, which I initially did, you may not have to know very much about anything else, but you must know about photography’. Yet the compositional sense of A Clockwork Orange or Full Metal Jacket is very different, more precise, and far removed from photojournalism. Noel Murray, reviewing the book for the AVClub, observes that Kubrick ‘couldn’t always control his environment, and these photographs contain a lot more spontaneity and documentary realism than his movies do’.

The French filmmaker Agnes Varda, associated with the Left Bank group (contemporaries of the Nouvelle Vague) and best known for real-time drama Cleo from 5 to 7, was a photographer before making the transition to film. In the early 1950’s she was a photographer for Jean Vilar, director of the Theatre National Populaire. Her luminous memoir-documentary The Beaches of Agnes has a moving sequence in which Varda exhibits her photos of actors. Varda explained in Interview magazine, ‘At the time I was making Beaches, they offered me a big exhibition in Avignon of photos I had shot there from 1950. The prints were five meters high – everyone was complimenting me. But all I could think of was that these marvellous actors, Gerard Philipe, Jean Vilar, Philippe Noiret were dead … Suddenly I felt a pang of emotion which led me back to the death of Jacques (Demy, her husband and director of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg).

CREDIT: Agnes Varda

Varda’s photography is not as well-known as her films, but critic Roger Ebert has said, ‘If she had only been a photographer, Varda would have been a great one, with her work in China, Cuba, Europe, America.’ Varda doubts she had seen ten films by the time she was twenty-five, when she made her first film La Pointe-Courte. In The Beaches of Agnes she narrates, ‘I thought if I added sound to photographs, that would be cinema’, adding that she had a lot to learn. But what she had learned from photography was her sense of composition. Her second feature Cleo from 5 to 7, about a singer who fears she has cancer, relies on elegantly composed and edited shots that reveal her background as a photographer.

Gordon Parks was the first black artist to produce and direct a major Hollywood film The Learning Tree in 1969, and went on to direct Shaft and a biography of blues singer Leadbelly. But before turning to film Parks had a distinguished career as a photographer.

CREDIT: Gordon Parks (right), working at FSA

In 1941 Parks chronicled black ghetto life on the south side of Chicago, and an exhibition of those photographs won him a photography fellowship with the Farm Security Administration (FSA). During his brief time with the agency he shot one of his best known images, American Gothic, Washington D.C.. It showed a black woman, Ella Watson, a cleaner in the FSA building, standing stiffly in front of an American flag, a mop in one hand and a broom in the other. About the photograph the New York Times explains, ‘Mr. Parks wanted the picture to speak to the existence of racial bigotry and inequality in the nation’s capital. He was in an angry mood when he asked the woman to pose, having earlier been refused service at a clothing store, a movie theatre and a restaurant.’ Parks later became a freelance fashion photographer for Vogue, and then a staff photographer and writer for Life magazine, where he remained for twenty-four years, shooting subjects including fashion, sports and poverty, and portraits of Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and others.

Parks’ best known film is the blaxploitation hit Shaft. Michael Thompson in a BBC retrospective writes ‘The film was hammered at the time for not being a full exposé of the black urban experience, and for being just a black version of a 40’s Hollywood gumshoe thriller, yet Shaft certainly has a black sensibility … and, even now, it seems radical to have a movie in which almost all the actors are black.’ The film is good fun, has an iconic soundtrack, and can justifiably be called a ‘racial breakthrough’, but Parks’ crowning achievement remains his photography.

Would we be talking about the photography of Ken Russell, Stanley Kubrick, Agnes Varda and Gordon Parks if they were not also renowned film directors? In the case of Gordon Parks I believe so. His obituary in the New York Times focused on his landmark photography, treating his excursions in film as a minor sidenote. But for Russell, Kubrick and Varda, photography was their training –  they honed the skill of composition, discovered their preference for subjects and themes – but they transcended the medium. Photography and film are superficially so similar, but not really the same. About Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni (L’Avventura), Ingmar Bergman said, ‘You know, Antonioni never really learned the trade. He concentrated on single images, never realising that film is a rhythmic flow of images, a movement.’ This is no slight on photography, but film is more than the single image. A director will use sound and music, direct actors, understand editing and dramatic construction. Russell, Kubrick and Varda are talented photographers, but brilliant directors. They found their medium.

Look out for an upcoming interview feature on contemporary photographers who shoot both stills and motion.

If you’ve ever bought a digital camcorder or DSLR with video capabilities, chances are you looked at test videos on Youtube or Vimeo. Most will guide you through the camera’s functions, different lens mounts, how it handles wobble and low-light conditions, things like that, with a lot of techy vocabulary and random city shots and footage of skateboarders.

This playful video-review of the soon to be released Canon EOS C300 by director and cinematographer Jonathan Yi is, he explains, ‘meant to poke fun at most camera test videos I’ve seen over the years. Canon, not thrilled with my sense of humour, does not credit or condone this video, but I think it shows a lot of the camera’s strengths.’ The video is silly and funny, pretty spot-on as a send-up – it made me realise how many of these things I looked at weighing up the purchase of a Canon 7D – and as a piece of salesmanship, I don’t think Canon could do better themselves.

Five Viral Hits in 2011, including photos of people scared out of their wits, babies playing at being adults, and an ‘ass-cam’.

Nightmares

Nightmares Fear Factory in Niagara Falls revealed the power of certain kinds of photography, when the photos of visitors to their Haunted House attraction went viral, going around the web and appearing on ABC News (New York, San Francisco) and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

The photos were disarmingly honest, but what’s fascinating was the sheer pleasure people around the world took in these pictures of terrified people. Is it a  sadistic pleasure at someone else’s pain? We suggested it was the opposite. A kind of empathy, a kind of second-hand pleasure of ‘fright’, where we can imagine the fear without actually having to experience it. And the framing of the imagery was also compelling, each photo shot from a similar angle and in a similar place. It has the format of an art project without all the baggage. A study, a typology of fear.

Will it Blend?

Only two viral campaigns have been watched over 100 million times, according to Ad Age in their Top 10 Viral Video Advertisements of All Time. Evian’s Live Young (158 million) and, in the top spot from 2011, Blendtec’s Will it Blend (173 million plus).

Babults (Babies Playing Adults)

Babies mimicking adults was a sure-fire viral YouTube hit in 2011. Creepy cool. Could this genre of baby videos have inspired the Rocksmith Guitar Baby viral (below)?

Film critics just keep getting younger and younger.

Precociously talented axe-man. Don’t be fooled by the sweet-looking face. On tour has been known to throw toys, poop in pants, and vomit up dinner. Rock ‘n’ Roll!

Killer Cute

Columnist Eva Wiseman in The Observer in London confessed to an addiction to ‘cute’. A self-confessed cuteaholic she is one of the 124,987,130 million-plus clicks on the Youtube video of a baby panda sneezing.

She suggests the most popular animal-cute videos (and cute videos are largely fluffy animals) are the ones where animals are mimicking some form of human activity. That’s probably as close a definition you’ll get of animal-cute, certainly fitting the bill of the recent cat-kitten hugs video dominating the viral charts.

Wiseman cites Ethnologist Konrad Lorenz who notes that visual characteristics such as big eyes, big head, and round face ‘stimulate caretaking behaviour.’ Which brings us to the AT&T Samsung Infuse 4G Smartphone spot. For cute addicts this may be the video that tips you over into overdose. Clever and Cute? Cutely Clever?  Too damned cute.

Cycle-rage

One cyclist’s outrage and desperation over unfair treatment leads to Jackass type video.

Riding high in the Viral Charts in 2011 was this footage of an exasperated New York cyclist. With over 2.6 million views in just over a week it seemed that slapstick was the best form of propaganda.

Bonus: Fake Virals

Some wonder about the usefulness to brands of ‘Fake Virals’, especially when they are found out. But because they make us ‘suspend our disbelief’, they give us the childish pleasure we used to get from classic fairy tales

Blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction is increasingly a staple of the viral video, and Mashable has provided a useful list of 9 Videos That Are Actually Advertising. They ask, ‘Is it actually better to try to orchestrate a viral campaign in which you distance yourself from the campaign? Are there well-known viral videos out there that are actually ads and we just don’t know about them? Why are so many Australians involved in these things?’ Don’t know about the Australians, but what these pieces do is play up to our desire to believe in them. The great ‘fake’ viral gives us permission ‘to believe’, to suspend our disbelief, just like the cinema before CGI-laden blockbuster. These Fake Virals are fairy tales, rooted in deeper myths and stories.

‘Ass-Cam’– Let’s call it ‘The Girls With Eyes In The Back of Their Heads (!)’ For Levi’s

The iPhone camera hack. Let’s call it ‘My Magic Wand’ Promo for film Limitless.

In the first of a new series shining a spotlight on up-and-coming photographers we interview young French photographer Amandine Paulandré. She has shot fashion editorials for Vice Style and other magazines, lives in ‘cheese country’, shoots only on film, and likes ‘confronting beautiful faces to wild nature’.

Could you tell us a little about yourself?

I grew up in a ski resort in the French Alps, since then I started taking pictures of whoever wanted to be photographed, and most of the time it was my cat. After high school I moved to London to study fashion photography which was not as interesting as I thought, so I came back to cheese country, in Paris, to study something else (philosophy). I still take pictures of course, but of a different cat.

CREDIT: Amandine Paulandré. Messina.

On your site you list your speciality as 35mm film photography. Do you shoot mainly on film? What does film offer you that digital cannot?

Indeed my speciality is 35mm, I only shoot using film for two or three years now. That’s how I started photography, and I find it reasonable to be the medium to finish with. I do have a fancy digital camera but it’s very useless to me since I find myself being a very bad photographer when using it. Digital is flat, but film photography is like opening a Christmas present each time you get your film back from the shop. You never quite know what to expect and I get overexcited each time on the way home with my developed film. Such a thing would not happen with digital.

CREDIT: Dimmers

I love the quality of light in many of your photos – slightly hazy and ethereal. How do you achieve that look?

I tend to not think when I take pictures, so getting a good light is usually coming from no where for me. I mean, I quite see where my subject would be lit up at his best, but that lasts for one picture as I get lost in all the things we should think about when taking a picture. So when I think of the light I guess it pays. I always use natural light. The best for me is the winter light through a window and, if you are lucky enough to see such light and use it well, then the person who will see the image should be feeling the snow falling on her head.

CREDIT: Amandine Paulandré. Maître corbeau.

Who or what are your inspirations (particularly in photography)?

I must say I’m very lazy and I don’t really go out there to see what others are doing, and when I see something I like I don’t remember the name. I don’t think I get inspired much by other photographers, I just do my thing. But of course I will give you one name: Julie Lansom, who inspires me with her face.

CREDIT: Amandine Paulandré. Whitby Moon.

Why do you like ‘confronting beautiful faces to wild nature’?

I like doing that because I like pretty faces but not like in magazines, not in front of a shitty white background. I love nature. I like mixing both things. But I still need to figure out a way to do it better than others as I start to realise that we all do that. Very, very depressing.

CREDIT: Amandine Paulandré. Lola.

From your work, do you have a favourite photo or series of photos?

I do have a series I particularly like. The series (excerpt below) was shot in Montpellier Zoo, south of France. I was on holiday at my new boyfriend’s place. I guess I like the series because of the fun I had, and because I love animals and since I was in a zoo I was very happy. Also I quite like the light and colour, it was probably the very first images I did of my boyfriend and one of my first ‘good’ film series.

CREDIT: Amandine Paulandré.

To see more of Amandine Paulandré’s work visit her personal site or her Flickr.

By Mark Wright (Assistant Editor)

Its Youtube page describes its interests as, ‘Being nice. Making people smile. Hopefully at the same time.’ Modest yet ambitious, thenicestplaceontheinter.net is a website showing people hugging the camera, encouraging video uploads from around the world in which people send their good vibes, eventually hugging the viewer behind the screen.

The first ISM Report (Image Source Monitor, a visual intelligence unit) reports on the new emotions and new language of ‘hugging’. As author Stephen King notes in his new time travel novel, 11.22.63 (number 2 on The New York Times bestseller list) men hugging in the 1950s was not a gesture that people would really have recognized. His lead character from 2011, who finds himself in the late 1950s allows himself one slip when hugging a male friend at a particularly emotional moment. Now the hug, and its many variations, are everywhere.

And while images of hugging sell well, even men hugging, signaling relationships along a spectrum from sports-like camaraderie, to the bromance, there is still uncertainty around the hug as an expression of emotion.

The ISM report identifies ‘the Crug’ which is a mixture of crying and hugging, (really overtop emotional display, real and fake, very contemporary) an increasingly familiar image on reality TV, awards ceremonies and TV talent shows.  And ‘the Shug’, the soft hug, which you’ll recognize at every political summit where politicians greet each other with a hug whose pretence at intimacy that only underlines the lack of warmth and feeling. Even the traditional hug has become more self-conscious. more expressive of its formality and ritual.

Image Source. Self-aware hugging

Image Source. Group Hug

thenicestplaceontheinter.net has taken digital intimacy to a new level. Being hugged by strangers over the internet? No stranger than Facebook friending. If the Man Hug has passed into the visual lexicon of everyday life, the final frontier may be the man-cuddle?

For more on the ISM Report and to read our visual trend forecast

Christmas Dinner Sociology 101

Image Source/Blend

Christmas is about tradition and every family has some version of Mum’s Christmas pudding/Pumpkin pie/Trifle. With busy lives, families often don’t spend as much time sharing meals together as in the past. With stats and research from groups such as the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) highlighting the psychological value of the family dinner, it’s no surprise that Christmas images of the family meal  exert a huge emotional pull, also reflected in sales of pictures of the different generations prepping traditional Christmas fare.

Image Source/Fancy

Father Christmas, Step-Father Christmas, and Fathers Christmas

Image Source/Fancy

Family arrangements in the West have become more diverse since the heyday of ‘the cereal packet family’. The nuclear unit (two parents with children) is still the dominant arrangement, but there is more diversity than ever before: cohabiting couples, same-sex parents, stepparents, and half-siblings. This can make for a thoroughly modern, and often unorthodox, Christmas family gathering.

Tim Walker in London’s Independent newspaper observes that ‘for an increasing number of families, the festive season is a moment … to tuck into a nut roast with their stepmums, half-brothers or granddad’s gay partner.’ This trend is reflected in Christmas images in this picture of a gay couple on Christmas morning. Another strange by-product of modern families, with kids parents’ having different partners, some parents are having two or three Christmas dinners. Which brings us to the Christmas  indigestion trend….

Image Source/Corbis

I’m Dreaming of a ‘Real’ Christmas Just Like the ones…

Image Source

Christmas never looks authentic, always popping with gaudy good cheer. That’s the point of Christmas. Visual excess. Yet even Christmas is not immune from the ‘authenticity’ trend (bearing in mind the ‘authentic’ is simply a different kind of image-making). And for good reasons. Economically difficult times means some consumers want to escape into the richly colorful Christmas fantasy, other consumers want imagery that reflects more sober times. The image above captures the eccentric spectacle of Christmas while grounding it in a spartan landscape. Whether in a boom or in a recession, the spirit of Christmas lives on even as a sole candy stick in a bare landscape.

Surfing Santa

Image Source

While those in the Southern Hemisphere can enjoy Christmas dinner on the barbie,  increasingly everyone else can have a taste of that too. In an age of (relatively) cheap air travel, more people are forsaking home for a sunny Christmas abroad. Image-markers are documenting the trend, showing sun-seekers choosing sand over snow, BBQ over a roast, making Santa swap a sleigh for a surf-board. Santa don’t surf?

Craft Christmas

Image Source

‘Craft’ has been a dominant buzzword over the last five years, partly fuelled by e-commerce sites such as Etsy, which enable designers and others to go direct to market with what would previously have been personal projects. In an age dominated by the anxiety around powerful, impersonal forces such as global financial institutions, the handmade is a sign of trustworthiness and honest toil. Trends in Christmas images have been subtly influenced by this wider social context. And when we’re working harder and longer, like Angels sometimes you need to take a load off.

Blue-Collar Santa

Image Source

Are we at all ambivalent about Santa? (Spoiler Alert) Do we still believe, I mean really believe, in an age of widespread disbelief and mistrust of institutions, is Santa wholly immune? He is. Santa is timeless. Even demand for images such as Santa on a laptop don’t actually demystify Santa but talk to consumers’ desire to bring Santa up to date. Where Santa has become a bit more real is when he taps into the dynamic of harder times. So the image of Santa commuting, or hauling presents around the suburbs speaks to the idea of the hard-working blue-collar Santa.

White Christmas – the New Minimalism

Image Source/IS2

The counter-trend for those who feel smothered in tinsel and knee deep in baubles is the White Christmas. Not the White Christmas of Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye, but the White Christmas of the graphic designer. There has been a pick up in demand in recent years for ‘Christmas Minimalism’. When we’re so hectic at work all-year-round, the appeal for the no mess, no fuss, wipe-clean Christmas is easy to see. And a minimalist Christmas doesn’t mean without feeling, Industrial designer Sebastian Bergne’s minimalist exploration of colour for his Nativity set has an emotional power because it isn’t figurative.

The Traditional Christmas Monkey

Image Source/Old Visuals

There is a whole subset of Christmas images that revolve around animals, and we’re not talking donkeys in stables or reindeer with sleighs. What Christmas would be truly Christmas without monkeys I hear you ask? Yes in the mid-20th Century when we sent monkeys into space we also liked dressing them up as humans. As this image suggests, Christmas was a time for giving, spending time with family and celebrating the 99 per cent DNA we share with our chimpanzee cousins.

The Ultimate Christmas Marketing Weapon

Image Source

“One Hundred times Bart, ‘Puppies Are Not For Christmas.’” True, Animal charities warn against buying a puppy at Christmas but who can resist buying from a puppy at Christmas? Not intrinsically Christmassy, no puppies in the stable at Bethlehem, but photos of puppies are hugely popular among art buyers simply because these  puppy dog eyes seal the deal. At Christmas time, they can get the Scroogiest Scrooge to buy anything.

Yuleanthropy

Image Source

Over recent years, charities working in the developing world have encouraged people to sponsor animals for deprived Third World communities. Part of what has been called Yuleanthropy – ethical gift giving. The humble goat has joined the pantheon of Christmas images, as the goat can provide milk to drink and sell, and goat manure can be used as fertilizer to grow vegetables. And the goat may have offspring. Some Animal organisations and Charities have suggested there are more efficient ways of alleviating Third World poverty through charitable giving, but images of animals to exert an emotional pull for people who may not otherwise consider gifting.

Naked Christmas

Image Source

A close companion of the minimalist White Christmas is the Naked Christmas. Clear from your mind the image of a pot-bellied Santa relaxing with milk and cookies, the Naked Christmas is about bringing a little bit of nature into your home, and leaving it undressed, as it were.  While the rich colours of traditional Christmas images speak to idea of the glittery romance of Christmas, Naked Christmas images feel fresh and improvised.

The Christmas Switcheroo

Image Source

The Christmas ad Water-Cooler moment was provided in the UK by retailer John Lewis. It was partly because their TV spot featured an easy-listening version of a song by legendary 1980s miserabilists, The Smiths, which caused a stir among middle-aged Smiths fans – but also because of the ad’s narrative twist. The desperately impatient child is counting down the days till Christmas not to get his presents but so he can give a charmingly badly wrapped Christmas present to his parents. So look at this picture above. See the girl staring lovingly at her present. Now look at the girl and imagine her staring at her exquisitely wrapped gift (girls are better wrappers, or at least that’s what I told my younger sister as I palmed off the chore of wrapping). A gift for her parents. See what John Lewis did? Christmas is about giving not receiving, a simple change of perspective.

See more Christmas stock photos

Here we present a collection of five photobooks that won major awards in 2011. Most are distinctly sociological and serious-minded, examining, variously, a still divided South Africa, the effect of incarceration on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the Mafia controlled streets of Naples, and the most dangerous city in the United States. And for even more variety we include the director of one of 2010’s worst reviewed movies (Fred: the Movie, with a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes) playing dress-up for his award-winning photobook.

Johannesburg 1948-2010

CREDIT: Contrasto.

In April, South African photographer David Goldblatt won, with co-author Ivan Vladislavic, the Kraszna-Krausz Best Photography Book Award for his examination of Johannesburg over 60 years. The book TJ: Johannesburg Photographs 1948-2010 / Double Negative: A Novel is two volumes, one featuring Goldberg’s pictures, the other Vladislavic’s prose.

The judges – Mary McCartney, David Campany and Yuka Yamaji – commented: ‘Goldblatt and Vladislavic’s ambitious project explores the relationship between text and image. A highly effective pairing of fiction and photography, this innovative collaboration redefines the possibilities for writing on and about photography.’

Of David Goldblatt, Claire Guillot in the Guardian said ‘He spent years, largely ignored by the media, exploring the values of South Africa. His beautifully composed, subtle pictures dissect the country’s contradictions, revealing the inner life of a still divided population.’

If the light goes out

CREDIT: Dewi Lewis Publishing

‘When you are suspended by a rope you can recover but every time I see a rope I remember. If the light goes out unexpectedly in a room, I am back in my cell.’
– Binyam Mohamed, Prisoner #1458

In May, Edmund Clark won best photographic book at the New York Photo Awards 2011 for Guantanamo: If the Light Goes Out, which documents ‘everyday living space in the Guantanamo Bay detention centre and in ex-detainees’ homes, considering the ongoing effect of incarceration on the prisoner’.

Clark explains on his site that ‘rather than an attempt to monumentalize the historical fact of the Guantanamo camps, these images illustrate three ideas of home: The naval base at Guantanamo which is home to the American community and of which the prison camps are just a part; the complex of camps where the detainees have been held, and the homes, new and old, where the former detainees now find themselves trying to rebuild their lives.’

be somebody

CREDIT: Clay Weiner. Self-published.

In June, writer and director Clay Weiner won the D&AD Award for Photography for Design for Try-Ons, a chronicle of his attempt to ‘be somebody’ by inhabiting the lives of an eccentric gallery of real and imaginary characters. He explained to the Denver Egotist ‘Growing up, I was always told to be somebody … In an attempt to find myself, I tried 85 personas. I’m still confused.’

the land of the camorrah

CREDIT: Valerio Spada. Self-published.

In September, Italian photographer Valerio Spada won Blurb’s Photography Book Now Grand Prize for Gomorrah Girl, about adolescence in the land of Camorrah (the name of the Mafia in Naples).

Spada explained to Blurb that ‘the book centres on a specific incident: On March 27, 2004, 14-year-old Annalisa Durante was killed in Forcella, a Naples area under the control of the Camorrah … In general, Gomorrah Girl shows the problems of becoming a woman in a dangerous, crime-ridden area. Adolescence is almost denied.’

Most dangerous city in the united states

CREDIT: Images En Manoeuvres Editions

This week, French photographer Jean-Christian Bourcart won the annual Prix Nadar for his photobook Camden, a portrait of a New Jersey city, the most dangerous in the United States.

He explained his intentions to the British Journal of Photography. ‘I needed to be closer to reality, closer to everyday’s life. I was also questioning myself on the motives of photojournalists who travel to a place and ‘coldly’ reports on what he or she sees … I didn’t want to pretend that I was telling other people’s stories, instead, I wanted to portray my own relationships with others’.

And as a bonus:

Best selling photobook 2011 (U.S.)

CREDIT: National Geographic

For the second year in a row, National Geographic published the bestselling photobook in the U.S. The book, Simply Beautiful Photographs, is a compilation of images from the National Geographic archive.

From Lana Del Rey’s Video Games music video that used grainy footage of starlets and skateboarders, to VW’s Golf Cabriolet advert, filmed in a sunny, retro home movie style, nostalgia was big in 2011. Nostalgia unites some of the big trends in photography this year; nostalgia for an old film aesthetic (indulged by apps like Hipstamatic, and instant cameras), and nostalgia for the past (Dear Photograph).

So let’s get nostalgic and look back with fondness at the big trends in photography this year. Each entry is accompanied by a choice article from the IMSO archive.

iPhoneography

CREDIT: Richard Koci Hernandez

In 2011, more and more people were using their mobile phone as their primary camera – in fact the iPhone has become the most used camera on photography site Flickr.

iPhoneographers, or mobile photographers, use apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic that square the photo and allow the user to apply filters to make the image look like it was taken with an instant camera. These apps are part of a retro trend in photography, with once ‘accidental’ effects like chromatic aberration and vignetting now aesthetically desirable.

The first ever conference dedicated to mobile photography, 1197 (the first camera phone photo was taken on June 11th 1997), was held in San Francisco in October this year. IMSO spoke to Richard Koci Hernandez, an Emmy award winning visual journalist, who presented a workshop at the conference. He explained the appeal of iPhoneography. ‘I can in two ‘clicks’ shoot an image then share it instantaneously. That’s crazy! It’s like having a printing press and an audience in my pocket.’

The Archive: Q&A with Richard Koci Hernandez, iPhoneographer

Photos within photos

CREDIT: a user submitted Dear Photograph by ‘Gina’

A sensation in 2011, the website Dear Photograph asks readers to submit photos of old photos, held up against the original backdrop, and caption them with short letters to the original image. Like a portal or a window in time, the past comes alive.

Chevrolet used a near-identical technique for one of their adverts this year – albeit with a few more bells and whistles – and the founder of Dear Photograph felt he deserved some credit. At IMSO we argued that, although Dear Photograph had undeniably popularised the technique, they were by no means its originator (similar projects, like Sleeveface or Segrey Larenkov’s Ghosts of WWII, pre-date it).

The Archive: Photo Project Controversy Rumbles On (about the Dear Photograph/Chevy controversy)

Cinemagraphs

CREDIT: Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck

Cinemagraphs are still photographs in which a small movement or action repeats endlessly. They are produced by taking a series of photographs or a video recording and, using image editing software, compositing the photographs or the video frames into an animated GIF.

With the best Cinemagraphs, movement or action is subtle, and isolated to just part of the frame – a spinning globe, a flickering candle, hair and grass tossed by a breeze. In a sense the technique recalls pre-cinema technology, like the Victorian Zoetrope, producing the illusion of action from a rapid succession of still images (and of course that is essentially what cinema is – 24 still frames a second).

Invented by photographers Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck in early 2011, Cinemagraphs have been hugely popular this year, with how-to guides popping up and lots of people having a go at their own. Companies and institutions, namely Citroen and University of Stirling, have been jumping on the bandwagon.

The Archive: The Animated GIF’s Cannes Moment (about GIF of Kirsten Dunst squirming next to Lars Von Trier)

Instant Cameras

CREDIT: Image Source

Part of the same retro trend as apps like Hipstamatic, the instant camera continues to make a comeback. In 2011 Fujifilm relaunched its Instax range of instant cameras, and three years after Polaroid discontinued its colour film, company Impossible Project (started with a small team of former Polaroid employees) brought out a new colour film for Polaroid cameras. Because the film was extra sensitive to light the company warned ‘poor shielding will … result in a strong pink or orange haze over the picture’. Pink or orange haze? That’s catnip to Polaroid lovers.

Simone Frignani, an Austrian who opened the Instant Film Shop in Berlin in 2009, sums up the appeal of instant cameras and Polaroids in particular: ‘the typical colours and formats of Polaroid shots (are what) make it special: silk, sepia, blue, charcoal. There’s also that very distinct clicking sound when you take the shot.’ That clicking sound has inspired a cult following. This year, Shutterlog (a collaboration between Mijonju and Cameron Lew) created a remix video from user-submitted footage of people clicking their analogue cameras.

The Archive: Instant Camera Prints on Receipt Paper

Return of realism

CREDIT: Image Source / Cultura RM

Earlier in the year we highlighted the return of realism in photography (in this interactive trend report The Art of the Real). The attributes of the new photographic realism include ‘imperfect’ framing (heads are often cropped out), washed out colours, no eye contact from the photograph’s subject, and extraneous life and detail. A good example of the trend is the documentary-style imagery of supermarket Sainsbury’s recent print campaign, featuring a father and son in seemingly unposed-for scenes. Perhaps realism sits better with consumers in hard times.

The cinematic equivalent of the return to realism is the backlash against CGI, and in advertising the popularity of lo-fi visual effects, like stop motion animation, that betray a human touch.

The Archive: Documentary Style for UK Supermarket

ISM (Image Source Monitor) is an Image Source research unit providing visual intelligence for our Art Directed shoots.

(Correction: the article originally stated that Polaroid brought out a new colour film this year, when in fact it was the Impossible Project. We apologise for the mistake and thank the guys at Impossible for setting us right).

Architecture of Density is a study of Hong Kong’s high rise developments. Residential tower blocks are photographed on large format and in extreme detail without the context of sky or ground. The bland, near-identical units look like abstract geometric shapes, but on closer inspection we see clothes lines, bird feeders, mops and air conditioning units – personalities adorning a suffocating architectural framework. The Tokyo Compression series shows commuters squashed on the Tokyo subway. Heads are bowed, bodies unnaturally contorted, and eyes are almost always shut. Transparent City depicts the architecture of domestic and office buildings in Chicago, windows fragmenting lives.

Michael Wolf was born in Germany but now lives and works between Hong Kong and Paris. He won the World Press Photo Award in 2005, and has exhibited his work in numerous museums and galleries. The Flowers exhibition runs from 25th November to 7th January, entry is free.

CREDIT: Michael Wolf, Courtesy of Flowers, London. Architecture of Density.

CREDIT: Michael Wolf, Courtesy of Flowers, London. Architecture of Density.

CREDIT: Michael Wolf, Courtesy of Flowers, London. Tokyo Compression.

CREDIT: Michael Wolf, Courtesy of Flowers, London. Transparent City.

CREDIT: Michael Wolf, Courtesy of Flowers, London. Transparent City.

By Mark Wright (Assistant Editor)

The growth of digital sales is easily understood, with the iTunes Music Store and similar services more convenient and offering more variety; no HMV can be expected to similarly accommodate, for example, Bob Dylan’s entire discography (thirty-four albums, not counting live recordings and compilations). But many people have argued that you lose something with digital albums – sound quality, and album artwork.

Yes, album covers are increasingly relegated to a thumbnail on an iPod screen, but that does not mean musicians have given up on the album cover. The album cover is arguably, alongside the music video, still the best way of defining a sound and identity.

The following are ten beautifully designed, photographed or illustrated album covers from 2011. The selected covers have appeared on top tens and curated lists by influential music sites, such as Art Vinyl and Complex.

There are two broad trends with entries one to five. 1. A minimal aesthetic, the image cropped into a shape and set against a plain background, and 2. nostalgic images (washed-out pastel colours, an old snapshot). Entries six to ten are an electic mix of painted covers, erotica, and illustrations.

1. Cut/Copy – Zonoscope

Zonoscope is the third studio album by Australian electronic band Cut/Copy. The cover art, showing New York City engulfed in a waterfall, was created by the Japanese photomontage artist Tsunehisa Kimura, who died in 2008. Zonoscope won the Artisan Award for Best Cover Art.

2. Still Corners – Creatures of an Hour

The debut album by ‘wafty British etherealists‘ Still Corners.

3. Metronomy – The English Reviera

The cover for electro-pop outfit Metronomy’s The English Reviera borrows the former logo of the English Riviera Tourist Board. Direction and layout by Aaron Larney and Joseph Mount (founder of the band).

4. The Drums – Portamento

The second studio album by American indie pop band The Drums. The cover image is a photo of singer Jonathon Pierce as a child. He explained to ClickMusic.com that it is ‘a photo I had in a photo album that I stole from my parents’ house when I ran away from home … We painted my eyes red in the photograph. I felt that was why my parents always feared me – like a demonic child’.

5. Real Estate – Days

The second album by psychedelic surf-pop band Real Estate. I love the retro typeface and the washed out, pastel colours.

6. Bon Iver – Bon Iver

Bon Iver’s self-titled second album. The cover was created by Minnesota artist Gregory Euclide. He used melted ice and snow ‘for all the water needed‘, whatever that means.

7. Washed Out – Within and Without

Washed Out’s debut album. The stock photo of a lovers clinch had first appeared in an issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, accompanying an article titled ‘Is This the Most Satisfying Sex Position?’

8. Butcher the Bar – For Each A Future Tethered

Beautiful illustration for Butcher the Bar’s second album.

9. Beastie Boys – Hot Sauce Committee Part Two

A square pixel design for the Beastie Boy’s Hot Sauce Committee Part Two (funnily enough, there was no ‘Hot Sauce Committee Part One’).

10. Bright Eyes – The People’s Key

Fiery cover art for Bright Eye’s The People’s Key designed by artist Zack Nipper.

By Mark Wright (Assistant Editor)

The zoetrope, meaning wheel of life, is a piece of pre-cinema technology that produces the illusion of movement by presenting static images in quick succession (see the image below). The zoetrope was a Victorian invention, but the basic principle, known as the persistence of vision, is the same as in cinema.

CREDIT: Wikipedia. Modern replica of Victoria zoetrope.

London-based graphic designer Katy Beveridge is the most recent person to have created a version of the zoetrope, attaching paper cutouts to the wheels of bicycles. The wheels were filmed spinning then later slowed down to around twenty-four frames per second (the wheels spinning in real time would have been a blur). The rotating snow-flake designs produce the magical visual effect of bobbing gears, puffs of smokes and other abstract forms.

Beveridge is not the first to make a bicycle zoetrope. On her YouTube video she credits Tim Wheatley and his Cyclotrope as an inspiration.

Decidedly more elaborate, when Pixar wanted to show the public how animation works they built an enormous three-dimension zoetrope. Eighteen sculptures of Woody from Toy Story (and eighteen of Buzz, eighteen of Jesse and so on), each slightly different than the last, are rotated on a plate under strobe lighting to create the illusion of movement.

The modern zoetrope shares with these lo-fi techniques the same endearing human touch.

The hilarious clip of a Labrador starting a stampede of deer in a London park, as his hapless owner gives chase, has become an internet sensation and spawned a series of parody videos.

At the time of writing the original video has 1.2 million views and a host of spoof clips have already emerged, many dubbing the dog owner’s exasperated cries of ‘Fenton! Oh Jesus Christ!’ onto movie clips. Here are our five favourite Fenton spoofs.

Fenton In The Wicker Man

Fenton In Jumanji

Fenton in Jurassic Park

Fenton in The Lion King

Fenton in Mars Attacks

As with any viral hit it can quickly become played out. But these spoofs, and of course the original, have really tickled us in the office.

Sesame Street was conceived 45 years ago at a Manhattan dinner party. A Carnegie Foundation executive’s remark that his daughter would stare at the test patterns on early morning TV prompted a debate about whether TV could be used to educate and entertain at the same time. “What if it went down more like ice cream than spinach?” asked TV producer Joan Cooney.

Being the sophisticates that we are in 2011 it seems a remarkable question, yet they had to invent a whole new genre of TV. An August Facebook online petition for Bert and Ernie to get married had nearly 7,000 followers. But an official announcement from the programme makers put an end to it. They are puppets and they have no sexual orientation. But, it turns out they have a sense of direction.

The longest cohabiting and celibate TV couple, Bert and Ernie in Sesame Street were the sixties TV’s answer to the question ‘can TV teach young children?’ Bert was based on a banana, Ernie on an Orange. 40 years later the question is: Can the Laurel and Hardy of educational TV make it as celebrity comedy satnav voices? With competition including SpongeBob and Homer Simpson and Yoda it will be a close call for our argumentative buddies.

In cinema we find the masters of the handcrafted aesthetic. The high priest of lo-fi visual effects is Michel Gondry (Science of Sleep) with his love of cardboard, lego and cotton wool clouds. Gondry’s contemporaries have also embraced lo-fi techniques: Spike Jonze used furry-costumed characters in Where the Wild Things Are, and Wes Anderson’s stop-motion Fantastic Mr. Fox featured models whose fur bristled in being repositioned for each frame.

Gondry, Jonze and Anderson have also made brilliant adverts, but the homespun sensibility goes beyond this trio of filmmakers. So let us turn our attention to the best lo-fi techniques advertising creatives are bringing into the high-tech age.

Hand-drawn Animation

The new Volkswagen ad is hand-drawn animation with a lo-fi twist: we can see the hands drawing. Time-lapse photography shows a girl’s hands as she draws on music sheet paper the evolution of the Volkswagen range, from the Beetle to the new Golf blue-e-motion.

Artist and filmmaker Richard Swarbrick spent over thirty hours hand drawing this thirty-second ad for the Sun newspaper. Footballer Wayne Rooney’s overhead strike is recreated using a technique similar to rotoscoping, the animator tracing over live-action film movement, frame by frame. The aesthetic is simple and beautiful: a flickering image, limited colour, and the absence of anything but the players, football and goal.

Rube Goldberg machines

A Rube Goldberg machine, named after the cartoonist, is a deliberately over-engineered machine that performs a very simple task, like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

In this viral ad Google used Rube Goldberg machines – a high-speed potato-chucker, a paint-flinger, and a lightning-striker – to demonstrate, in the most fun but convoluted way, the speed of its Chrome browser. These machines are the kind of ‘cracking contraptions’ Wallace (ala Wallace and Gromit) might knock up – mad and beautiful one-offs.

Rube Goldberg-like, the famous Cog advert for Honda consists of two sixty-second dolly shots invisibly stitched together. Director Antoine Bardou-Jacquet used as little computer-generated imagery as possible and this is key to the ad’s success. The complex chain reaction delights us because we believe what we are seeing and appreciate the mindboggling precision of it all.

Graffiti animation

Animation using images painted directly on walls, a technique pioneered by Italian graffiti artist Blu, has come to the adverts. Vauxhall used the technique in an advert for the new Corsa: brightly coloured arrows, cartoon animals and men move along walls in fluid motion.

Credit Confidential, a credit report service, also used graffiti animation for one of their ads, this time showing a ‘mural man’ running through a city.

Stop motion

Stop motion using clay figures dates back almost a century. This ad for the Sony Bravia LCD television features a dazzling example of the technique. Brightly coloured clay bunnies bound through New York City, then dissolve into a tidal wave, from which crests a giant orange whale, and on it goes like that. The obvious time and labour that has gone into manipulating the clay figures a frame at a time is part of the pleasure.

This recent ad for the Kia Picanto is based on a truly off-the-wall idea: nail-art stop motion. Nine hundred individually painted fingernails create the illusion of movement when played as a continuous sequence.

This selection of lo-fi techniques in advertising is by no means exhaustive. We have not even touched on lego animation, flick books, and puppets.

What unites all the techniques mentioned is a human touch. Of course there are humans pushing pixels and creating CGI monstrosities like Transformers but they remain deliberately invisible. Lo-fi techniques appeal to our humanity.

By Mark Wright (Assistant Editor)

Why do people un-tag their Facebook photos? Young people might because the photos are ‘incriminating’ and they have their parents on Facebook. But for others who un-tag might it be because ‘we have been conditioned to only accept a likeness of our mental self-image’? When I go on Facebook after a night out and see myself staring back, half-blinking and gormless, I refuse to believe that that is what I normally look like (though it probably is), and promptly un-tag.

The question of why we often reject a clear likeness of ourselves lies at the heart of an intriguing photo project, Unlikeness, by Marcus Kern. In makeshift locations around East London Kern has people sit for portrait photos. He takes a few then chooses one and prints it immediately on a mobile printer. If the sitter likes the photo they can keep it, free of charge, but if they do not then Kern holds onto it.

By simply giving the photograph to the subject Kern challenges how much ownership we grant the photographer taking the image. On his website he asks ‘How come that the person/object ‘captured’ in the image either has no rights or pays handsomely to regain partial ownership of the created likeness?’

We caught up with Marcus Kern to hear about the inspirations behind the Unlikeness project, the reasons people give for not liking their portraits, and whether he ever un-tags his Facebook photos.

Could you tell us a little about yourself?

I grew up in Germany, now live in London and work in my ‘day job’ as a technical director for a mobile marketing company. I learned photography when I was 13, a passion I maintained all through my University (I studied Physics), but I never formally trained or worked as a photographer – something I’d like to change sometime soon. I enjoy photographing people; I like the human interaction around taking photographs. I had the idea for the Unlikeness project in December 2009. The idea didn’t let me go and drove me all the way to my first Unlikeness session in July 2010.

CREDIT: Marcus Kern. An unliked portrait.

What inspired the Unlikeness project?

I wanted to create an environment where photographer and sitter build a relationship of giving to each other. Unlikeness is a collaborative photography project about choice and ownership, taking and giving, power and value. The resulting portrait photographs are predicated on the relationship between photographer, sitter and self-image.

Photographically August Sander’s work in the 1920s inspires me. But the inspiration to keep taking photographs comes out of the project itself. Constantly meeting new people, hearing their stories, sharing mine and following up months later is the biggest inspiration for it all. I photograph black and white to bring out the person rather then the colours.

Was there a particular experience that made you feel strongly about how much ownership the photographer has compared to how little the person captured has?

The project idea came to me when I watched the Contacts series by William Klein on DVD in 2009. I was intrigued by the concept of street photography, where life can throw a million challenges and opportunities at you and at the same time I was put off by the mostly powerless position of the subjects in these photographs.

Looking at Bruce Gilden’s work (which does yield incredible images) I can’t help but feel that the subjects should have a say in the capturing of their likeness. Does the end justify the means? Are the people in the frame giving their selves fully?

The fact that the person captured has the final say about the future of the image is absolutely key to the Unlikeness project.

CREDIT: Marcus Kern. Another unliked portrait.