I was just looking through this morning's South Coast Plaza Spring 2008 advertising insert in the Orange County Register newspaper.
This is a photo book showing off products from the high end merchants at the South Coast Plaza shopping center here in Orange County California. These are places like Giorgio Armani, Louis Vuitton, Yves Saint Laurent, Versace, etc. High end, expensive places.
They pay big bucks to get their advertising done by the best in the business.

And I am looking at the photos, and saying "What is going on here. The lighting is not right on these models. They are too dark. You can not see their features well." In other words, they did not impress me as good portrait work. And by high end professional photographers, for high end clients. I was puzzled for a few minutes, until I realized,

These were not portraits. Of course. These were fashion photographs. Their purpose was to show off the clothing and accessories. The people were just incidental, only there to have something to put the products on.

With that in mind, I looked over the whole collection. And it was true of almost every one of the photos. It was as if lighting and camera angle was intentionally selected to not let the model distract you from looking at the products. What a different way of approaching a photograph.

I think I prefer focusing on the person, and letting the clothing and accessories just sort of "be there" if they must.



Create your own visitor map!