The Germans love to love British understatement and see it as the embodiment of sophistication and class. This is a departure from the true inner nature, but it is aspirational and that has to be good. As such understatement in some form is ubiquitous in their branding and advertising.

The Brits meanwhile are still trying to understand their that little ‘je ne sais quoi’ which the Normans left them with way back in 1066 and are still unsure whether it has really translated into a genuine understatement – or simply represents a mild case of petulance. This too is evident in most of their branding and advertising. The French meanwhile …..oh forget it, this has gone too far already.

Like most other of my fellows (with Germans roots) I like a tidy desk and have no trouble in trying to pass muster by promoting neatness and minimalism as that magic ‘understatement thing’. But in as much as I share a common trait I also see myself as a closet non conformist. As such I am always trying to sneak a wee bit of statement into my understatements. One takes standard precautions not to descend into Wagnerian excesses – but that is taken as read.

So it is with these two images where the inevitable Audi marketing brief (that almost sterile visual understatement) is always dominant: There is a touch of satisfaction in having worked to push the envelope just a touch.

2012 Volkswagen bug

Well they have to describe it as lovable since most of the population don’t groove on actual insects. But it is not a real bug and surely we can acknowledge that there is at least a measure of cuteness in their commitment to brand it as cute.

But I have to say – as a former owner of a vintage VW Beetle – which hardly managed to stay on the road (both from a reliability point of view as well as its dire road holding) – the term ‘lovable’ just does not work – even if I pull the choke and pump the gas hard.

If the name of the game is ‘retro’, and some brand manager wants me to think of actually owning one, that falls completely flat. The ‘retro’ involved with this reminds me of nothing other than frequent breakdowns in very inconvenient places in my youth – such as remote parts of the African veld.

You might say “how romantic!” and urge me, after all this time to well up a tear for the remote places that vehicle dragged you to?. You may as well also ask me to chuckle about the times some other vehicle had to drag me out of there. Or of the times the remote workshop they took me to lacked spares. Sadly I am not chuckling. I was not amused then and I am not now.

You know the T shirt that reads “The older I get the better I was”. I am trying pretty hard to be generous and apply that principle to this car. What’s wrong with a bit of nostalgia then? Nothing – so long as one does not have to dip more than the tip of a toe into the river of time to get it.

When I think hard about it I think the only thing I can stretch to ‘sentimental’ about are the famed original advertising campaigns of the 60s – which sadly cited dependability above all. ‘What does the guy who drives the snow plow drive to work in’ was a great piece of advertising copy. Wouldn’t it be nice were that nothing but a load of old cobblers? I might have been able to binge on sentimentality about the branding – but now – not so much!

But seriously, at a visual level, the real attraction of this vehicle is not the the kind of profound nostalgia one gets from a custom car.  The real attraction for the ‘branding engineer’ is that it bucks that homogeneous/indistinguishable modern car look. Nothing more! It makes a cosmetic statement which probably exploits an entire era – when cars were not designed to look more aerodynamic than they really were- rather than bringing the driver closer to the experience/trauma of owning and original beetle.

There’s the dry informative approach to car advertising (simple unpretentious product photography) which works just fine for car geeks (which by the way includes the people who make and sell us these instruments of transportation). One might get to stretch their positive response to action shots – - ‘the machine performing perfectly out there in some spectacular environment’.

But what about the rest of us who seek fun in our lives. We want to invite technology to the party.

Party Picture - 2012 Ford Explorer

Well it is not only for the downtown crush. The new Scion IQ shows off its trendy credentials in suburbia.

2012 Scion IQ

An eerie evening downtown San Jose, made even more strange by the fact that this should be the rainy time of year. But every day it feels like summer and precipitation is such a distant concept, it’s non appearance is no longer given a token mention by weather watchers.

Moon rising over downtown San Jose

2011 Porsche 911 running shot

For and even larger copy of this image go here 

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2011 poster

Another year, another very satisfying and fun project: helping Claude Shade (Goodby Silverstein) with technical and retouching work on his frequently sought after poster for this event.

HSBG series of free concerts in Golden Gate Park, which attract hundreds of thousands of visitors over a few days. The poster is not advertising, it is a gift. It is solely made band members and the staff who work on the festival. This year it featured no less than 90 world class bands.

It is a crime to even try to namedrop a few but hey - go ahead – arrest me. Without referring to the list, this year - -  Robert Plant, Earl Scruggs, Gillian Welch, Kris Kristofferson and Merle Haggard are names which have rise to the top for me. Determined fans can go here for a comprehensive list.

Claude’s unique cowboy style copy setting. both for the poster and the T-shirt proved a daunting task in itself with so many bands – not least deciding on placement and priority. The text is too small to read on the enclosed jpeg but believe!  -  everyone is there somewhere.

People ask where they can buy a copy of the poster. The answer I always give is simple  -  ”you can’t”

The New PDF  (14mb)

The new ipad friendly galleries

Agency requests for a physical photographer’s portfolios have fallen to an all time low. At the same time  - having the work available to view on a mobile device has assumed a new importance.

Yes, for the quality conscious photo buyer, seeing prints in high resolution (as opposed to on screen web renditions) is reassuring.

But if the book consists of ink jet prints, it has to be very large to impress the viewer in that sense – and prove that the images and retouching bears close scrutiny. Few take into account that ink jet prints only achieve an effective resolution of around 100 dpi. What this means is that even a moderately generous sized web image contains more detail than the print in the average portfolio ‘book’.

And what is more, with a back lit screen, one can judge the tonal range of the image more critically. If a client really must ‘feel the weave’  - you just send them high resolution files. The demise of the physical book may have been exaggerated – but not by much.

No one can deny that a physical book has a few things going for it which a digital file lacks. One is tactile  -  it may be a unique physical object, and two is the format in which one sees images in a fixed relationship to each other.

The new automotive/landscape PDF was produced to appear as spreads although one can still zoom in and see it in single page format. At 15 mb it is a fair sized download but when viewed on a pad device it gets closer to a physical book in one sense. One can touch the pages.

Roll on the introduction of very high resolution displays for pad devices. It cant be far away. Photos and photo books will come alive in ways they never could in the past.

Concepts and hard liquor advertising dont mix? Try them shaken, not stirred.

This cocktail we prepared with a touch of CGI, blended with an elaborate multi-exposure studio photograph of a wickedly difficult to light (at an angle) square bottle we had prepared earlier.

As with many ‘concepts’, this idea could have communicated very well, as a line illustration. Achieving a feeling of space and a crystal clear (sapphire like) light/sky was the real challenge, extending the core idea with photo realism, rather than just producing a decorative photo-illustration to keep it company on the page.

Bombay Sapphire 'Skywriter'