Closing the circle on the Sony ad and "Timing Is Everything"
A few weeks back, I posted about Sony using a 1965 John Dominis photograph to illustrate how "Timing Is Everything." Given that the picture in question could hardly have been taken with a Sony digital camera (which wouldn't exist for decades), I thought it a poor choice to illustrate the technical prowess of Sony's latest digital SLR.
After I wrote the original post, I noticed something else when I was studying the original photograph and the one in the ad; they weren't quite the same. I thought it a slightly amusing oddity but not much more. The differences were fairly clear if you looked at a blowup, but they were fairly subtle at more modest sizes.
In any case, while perusing Time Magazine last week I ran across another ad in the series that caused me to go "Huh?" (I think it was a bit saltier than that but you get the idea.) The ad in Time was clearly intended to show an example of bad timing.
In fact, that's exactly the point of the whole series of ads created for this campaign by BBDO New York. (A third ad is here.) As MediaPost says:
Timing is everything, especially when you're taking pictures. If you've ever wondered what a famous photo would look like had it been taken a second or two later, then you're bound to enjoy this print campaign for Sony's Alpha DSLR-A700 camera. Imagine the construction workers eating lunch atop a steel beam while others were still working. Or a leopard readying to attack a baboon. What would happen if a referee stood in the way of Brandi Chastain's winning penalty kick and striptease?
On the one hand I feel a little silly. I badly missed the point of the ad.
Having said that, I have to give BBDO New York a 2 out of 3 for this campaign. The construction workers and the Brandi Chastain shots are clear examples of bad timing. They're witty ads and unambiguously make their point.
The leopard and baboon, however? It's not as good as the one that Life originally published. But the differences are slight. And, in spite of one or two comments made to my original post, I don't see how anyone could call the shot used for the ad a bad or badly-timed photograph in an absolute sense. I won't argue that everyone else should share my aesthetic opinion but I'm confident that had I taken that picture, I'd have a big enlargement hanging on my wall. And I doubt that I'm alone in that.
So I stand by my opinion that it was a poor choice for this ad--just for different reasons than I initially thought.
(P.S. I don't know if the ads used in the campaign are different shots in the original sequences or if they are Photoshopped versions of the original "good" photographs. I was initially somewhat puzzled when I carefully studied the two Dominis shots (the Life version and the Sony ad version)--because there seemed to be more differences on the baboon side than on the leopard side. Nothing conclusive, but it didn't look quite right to be two shots in the sequence even if I did try to convince myself that the mechanics worked. At the time, it just made no sense to me that someone would have digitally manipulated the photo to make it worse. See also the discussion in the comments. Now, of course, knowing that the whole idea was to have "bad" versions of iconic photographs, deliberately degrading part of the picture makes perfect sense.)
Gordon Haff is a principal IT adviser at Illuminata and has more than 20 years of IT industry experience. He writes about what's happening with enterprise servers and data centers, "Yotta-scale" computing, and related software and device trends as part of the CNET Blog Network. Disclosure. 
I had meant to write...
It seems most of us know something of what we're talking about, but none knows all. It is virtually impossible to reverse-engineer most advertising. A major ad involves too many people, factors, limitations, decisions and compromises to be sure of your conclusion. Maybe Sony **was** trying to show how bad timing ruins a great photo, but if so, they've changed their tack, because the photo on the inside back cover of the Dec 24 Time Magazine (US, edition; of skyscraper construction workers eating lunch, all 11 faces perfectly hidden by a transported girder) is clearly the right moment. Furthermore, the garb shows it's clearly a very old photo (Empire State Building?), so there is no implication that it was taken with a Sony camera.
This is hardly analogous to the Volvo commercial where they ran a monster truck over the car without mentioning that braces had been added to the roof. (Ironically, one of that agency's first Volvo ads, long before, showed multiple sedans stacked on top of each other, asking "Are you in the market for a hardtop?")
I haven't seen the other photos mentioned, so I can't say whether the campaign has changed, or the choice of photos has been sometimes less than perfect, or the rights might have been unavailable, or our interpretations of beauty differ. It could be all of that.
Yes, it would be nice if all the photos had been taken with a Sony. But I've been a semi-pro photographer, and the ad's point -- that some electronic cameras impose horrendous wait times and shutter lag -- was immediately apparent to me, and (at least in this case) I didn't even ask myself whether the photo was taken with a Sony. The ad works.
I immediately recognized that something was amiss there (whereas I didn't in the other one even though I also recognized that photograph.) But I can certainly understand why you reacted as you did. Very different photo with the beam but not necessarily "bad" unless you were thinking in terms of the original.
Timing is everything, it's a nice article. I have red this. The work of auther is really appreciating.
Ron
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