It is probably a universal disease –  shooting roads that is. Here are a few new ones.

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Square Moon Rising for Square One Vodka

They say: 100-percent organic American rye and water from the Snake River watershed of the Teton Range. And certainly it is very smooth.

On a photo-technical level – the unusual square bottle shape offers a range of interesting lighting options. Here we went for the stripe effect but it could be anything. Shooting ’round bottles’ can become a bit of a chore technically.

Familiar Objects: a studio still life set celebrating depth of field (with focus stacking): The geek in me would say this little series started out as an exercise in the use of focus stacking.  Another part of me says it is simply because I am tired of Bokeh.

Bokeh’s persistent attraction for photographers is that shows right in the photos that the photographer is a big deal, is rich and can afford expensive lenses. And yet so often it is the lazy photographer’s passport to sophistication in visual terms. In that sense it is the cheapskate option and I am heartily sick of it as a solution (but one has to say it looks fabulous when it really works).

The rest of me denies that it has anything to do with any of the above. Having grown up with large format cameras and the ethos of F64 and the larger than life quality that small life can exhibit (when revealed with extreme depth of field), this was a chance to think of the world in miniature and to hell with anything else. Hopefully that is what comes across in the images and in commercial terms, this kind of escape is what this approach offers the viewer of the ad featuring treatments.

There is a dedicated gallery of Familiar Objects here http://www.philipchudy.com/galleries/projects/familiarobjects/

…and  here are two more recent additions which never made it to the original set (click to see larger)

To get it with these images you have to see them in full resolution (or on a large print). Perhaps I will include a few close up sections another time.

Kitchen sink

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

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