It’s pretty amazing how much work goes in to commercial food photography, even if it’s a delivery pizza. Domino’s Pizza has a short video showing the behind-the-scenes action during a pizza photo shoot, complete with food stylists, a pizza screwed to the table, and a hand model. But Domino’s new ad movement is all about ditching the food embellishments and promising “natural” photos from now on — photos of pizzas made by employees and untouched by food artists during the photo shoot. (Though we noticed they didn’t promise to go easy on post-processing!)

To promote their new photo style, the pizza chain is also running a photo contest for customers to submit photos of their own Domino’s pizza to be featured in upcoming ads. Winners get $500 — that could buy a lot of pizzas!

Olympus’ most recent E-PL1 commercial, PEN Giant, is stop-motion with a big picture — or big pictures, literally. A total of 355 prints were made on billboards and shot again, all produced with the Olympus PEN.

Olympus has a way with narrative in their commercials.

The first PEN Story came out last July, and was a little over three minutes long, but comprised of some 1,800 photos of 9,600 prints, out of a total of 60,000 photos originally taken for the project. Yeah, it gets kind of meta.

Both commercials give a creative nod to Takeuchi Taijin. Takeuchi’s stop-motion, “Wolf and Pig” might look a little familiar, if you’ve seen the original Olympus PEN Story.

The tech war is on between Apple and Adobe, and it’s starting to sound political. What’s fairly interesting is how Adobe’s been running “We [heart] Apple” as well as “We [heart] Choice” ads, suggesting that this tech war is all about word choice — or perhaps the word, “choice.”

The lack of Flash on Apple mobile devices has been a growing issue, especially since the release of the iPad. Apple’s omission left a lot of creatives, including photographers, scrambling to find a substitute for Flash-based sites.

A few weeks ago, Steve Jobs published his thoughts behind Apple’s movement away from Flash capabilities in mobile products.

Today, Adobe’s co-founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock  responded in an open letter that was published in newspaper ads and on its website, titling it “Our Thoughts on Open Markets.” The letter launched alongside a new section on Adobe’s site called “Freedom of Choice.”Adobe also published a page titled “The truth about Flash,” which responds point-by-point to most of Jobs’ arguments.

Jobs had ended his letter with a stab at Adobe, saying:

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Adobe responded:

We believe that Apple, by taking the opposite approach, has taken a step that could undermine this next chapter of the web — the chapter in which mobile devices outnumber computers, any individual can be a publisher, and content is accessed anywhere and at any time.

In the end, we believe the question is really this: Who controls the World Wide Web? And we believe the answer is: nobody — and everybody, but certainly not a single company.

So far this seems to be a war of words; Apple and Adobe are fighting over ownership of what “open,” really means and what the future of the Internet (and your portfolio) will look like.

Let us know where you stand on the issue in the comments.

This amazing video by Romain Pergeaux and Alex Profit shows a journey around the cities of the world in 80 seconds through stop-motion. It was shot with a Sony HX5V compact camera, and shows 640 different photographs at 8 photographs per second. A special rig was also used to show a physical globe with pins in every shot, and the photographs were taken over the course of only 3 weeks. From the official website for the video, it looks like a viral promotional video for Sony’s camera, but it’s a pretty awesome effort nonetheless.

Burger King recently partnered up with marketing agency Ogilvy for a unique “Have It Your Way” campaign. In order to convey how personalized the orders are, they used a hidden camera and printer to slap a candid photograph of the customer’s face right on the burger wrapper. A separate hidden camera was used to document the reactions of the customers after seeing themselves on their food.

Some customers pulled out cameras to remember the unique wrapper, while others stated they would save the wrapper itself. I found it pretty funny how unflattering the candid portraits were.

(via CNET)

There’s a new video on YouTube showing a gigantic shipping container camera promoting a Samsung camera. In the video, bystanders can actually use the “camera” by inserting some money into a coin slot, and then having someone jump onto the massive shutter button on top of the shipping container. The resulting photograph is then displayed on a gigantic screen atop a nearby building.

It looks like this whole thing is simply a viral video created by Samsung. Here are some indicators:

• The video was posted by cr8yourworld, which looks like an account created specifically for this campaign by Samsung.
• Can you imagine the lawsuits Samsung would face if this thing were actually real, and people started falling off the container while pressing the “shutter”?
• There’s a square helicopter at the end

Anyhow, fake or not, it’s a pretty fun idea. If only they actually created something like this (albeit safer) in some big city.

(via Trend Hunter)

The Nikon Coolpix site now features an interesting tool for viewing photos, utilizing the viewer’s webcam and hand motions to flip through and zoom in and out of images. (Think: that one Spielberg film with Tom Cruise…)

The online tool, Virtual Touch Experience, is a javascript app that the user drags to their browser bookmark bar. When the bookmark is clicked while viewing compatible image sites, the images are opened for interaction in another window.

Virtual Touch Experience is a clever ad campaign designed by MRM Worldwide for Nikon’s touch screen Coolpix S70. According to the press release, it’s supposed to emulate the touch screen experience of the camera, as well as Nikon’s emphasis on the human element/touch in photography.

Though Virtual Touch Experience isn’t something you might actually integrate into routine photo viewing, (personally, my arm got really tired, and then I felt a little silly), it’s an interesting idea to make photos more interactive.

We’re curious to see if photo viewing and sorting could go the way of physical interactivity using hardware motion sensors like Nintendo Wii or Microsoft’s Project Natal someday.

We’re on a roll with controversial advertisements today. New York garment company Weatherproof has gotten the attention of the White House after illegally using a photograph of President Obama’s visit to the Great Wall of China on a billboard in New York City (41st St. and 7th Ave.)

While Weatherproof did pay the licensing fees to use the image from the The Associated Press, they didn’t ask for permission from the White House, which has a pretty strict policy of not allowing the President’s image to be used for commercial purposes.

It all started when the company’s president Freddie Stollmack recognized the coat in the photo, and had it confirmed by examining a high resolution version. After having an advertisement containing the image rejected by a few of NYC’s top newspapers, the company installed the billboard advertisement two days ago.

Since then, the White House has in fact contacted the company about the ad, and the company has agreed to take the ad down but — get this — in two weeks. In the end, Weatherproof is likely the big winner, having succeeded in generating a buzz with this publicity stunt.

(via A Photo Editor)

Image credit: Photograph by Brechtbug and used with permission.

Harry Potter actress Emma Watson recently appeared in a Burberry advertising campaign with her brother Alex, and one particular image in the series has created quite a hoopla. In the image above, it appears as through most of her right leg has been completely edited out of the photograph. When I first saw the image, I thought the leg was simply hidden behind her brother’s left leg, but the image continues to cause a stir around the web. Do you think this is an example of Photoshop taken too far?

Update: Matt Dixon left a comment that provides pretty convincing evidence that it’s not a Photoshop disaster after all. Here’s a behind-the-scenes video: