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Posts Tagged ‘Seattle commercial and advertising photography’

Video And Animation . . .

Sunday, March 18th, 2012

I think that video and animation is something that stills photographers have to become more aware of in order to be competitive.  One of the areas is simple animation of still photographs.  Fortunately, Photoshop CS5 has an application within it to take your still photo and make a short animated video that can keep on running on your web page to attract attention.  Older versions may have this capability also, but since I no longer have any of them available, I can only speak to what I have.  (See the image below to get an idea of what can be done.)  I have used the header image from our We Shoot Facebook page at http://on.fb.me/kH0Ozp to make a flashing “Eat at Joe’s” type of billboard for this purpose.  There are three transitions: First, just as a collage; second, “Call Now” is added; and, third, our phone number is flashed over our name.

I won’t go into how to make such an animation except to say that you go into the menu at the top of Photoshop and pick Window>Animation.  You can look up how to use this in the help menu, or go to Vimeo or Youtube to get step-by-step instructions on how to carry this out.  If you already have a knowledge of timelines in slideshows or video editing programs, you are already on your way.

BTW, the file size can be made relatively small, and take almost no time to load.  The animation will not work on some web pages, such as on Flickr, but will work elsewhere, and unless you have it blocked on your own website, it will probably work there.  As you can see, it works on this blog.

Have fun.

-Gary Silverstein

We Shoot

Tags: animation, fun, http://weshoot.com, photography, Seattle commercial and advertising photography, stills, video
Posted in How To, Marketing, Tips | Comments Off on Video And Animation . . .

Putting Lipstick on a Pig . . .

Thursday, February 16th, 2012

Some years ago, I was emailed by a man who wanted me to photograph a business property. He was a commercial real estate broker with a property to sell. He sent an image he had taken of a rundown business property in our area and wanted to know if we could photograph it. I called him, and we exchanged information.  I said I had viewed the image he sent and was curious why he would spend money on getting an image of such a property, to which he replied, “I need a pro to take the image, and then put some lipstick on this pig.” I asked him what he meant. He said he wanted the property to look great and that our photographic ability plus considerable Photoshop editing skills could make winning images. He would be showing the images to a buyer out of state, and he might be able to make a sale on the strength of my images. He wanted me to be complicit in fraud! Once I heard this, there was no way I was having anything to do with such activities, but out of curiosity, I asked him what his budget was for this, and he said he had very limited funds and could only pay about one-fourth of my then day rate. Not only did he have the chutzpa to ask me to commit fraud, even though I wouldn’t have shot and altered the image for profit, he still had the gall to think I would be thrilled to do it at no profit! I hope everyone he called was willing to say no.

Now, I have been asked to enhance properties before, like the time the water truck broke down that was used to wet down a parking lot and I had to make a parking lot look wet for an image. I was also asked before to put two adjacent aerial images together of an airport my partner had taken, and make one photo out of them, and then extend the airport background to look like the drop-off behind the airport had been filled in, and a retaining wall added. This was sort of a photographer’s rendering of what the airport could look like if the airport hired my client to remodel the airport. Another time, a company hired me to take an older aerial image of a building they had built and update it to close to what the building looked like now with landscaping as they couldn’t get another aerial shot. I, of course, went to the building and did extensive work to make a realistic image of the building that I imagined from the air. This image was made into a large print, framed, and hung in the boardroom of the construction company.

In these images in the above paragraph, there was no attempt to defraud anyone. If anyone asks you to do something like this, make sure of what their intentions are. Ask questions. And if someone asks you to “Put lipstick on this pig,” run the other way as fast as you can.

– Gary Silverstein
We Shoot

Tags: architectural, architecture, Seattle commercial and advertising photography, weshoot.com
Posted in Learning, Tips | Comments Off on Putting Lipstick on a Pig . . .

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