The Pervasive Data Center

Over at Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey notes:

A recent post by photographer J.M. Goldstein raised a very interesting question about Flickr and its API, namely whether or not Flickr was policing its API well enough and doing an adequate job protecting the rights of photographers and artists that post to the service.

I would have thought the answer was obvious. No.

Or, perhaps more accurately, Flickr has apparently decided either deliberately or as a matter of generalized neglect that providing its users with more sophisticated and granular tools to protect their content isn't a priority.

While there is much that I like about Flickr, it's simply not the best service if you want to carefully control who accesses your photos and exactly how they can access them. SmugMug and PhotoShelter are two services that have put far more thought and effort into this aspect of their respective sites.

Speaking personally, I still use Flickr anyway. The price is right--$25 per year for a Pro account which gives me unlimited storage and uploads. While I would prefer to secure my photos a bit better, doing so isn't really all that important to me given that I don't sell them.

So, while the criticism seems valid enough, it's also part and parcel of Flickr's emphasis on sharing and community over tight user control of their creative product. When picking Flickr or any other photo site, it's important to understand not just its pricing scheme, reliability, and how well their user interface works but, as importantly, the underlying priorities that drive all sorts of design choices.

A post earlier this year by CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland pondering how he should store photos while traveling got me thinking about the same question.

I can't claim to have come up with "the answer," but I've thought about the issues, read through some discussions about what people consider best practices, and have tried to roughly quantify relative failure rates. What's right for you will depend on priorities and circumstances, but hopefully the following will offer some food for thought.

Real-world failure rates are hard to come by. However, having been the owner of a variety of laptops and other devices with hard disk drives, a 1:100 drive failure rate in a portable device over the course of a month's vacation doesn't seem out of line. Flash memory fails too. Anecdotal information from a couple of dealers (based on product returns) suggests that a 1:1000 rate is a reasonable stake in the ground--10x the reliability of disk. Further complicating the story is that some errors are recoverable, but you'd probably better stop using the card when you have a problem.

That's the hardware. Then there's the wetware--i.e. you.

This one's even harder to quantify. However, speaking for myself, I'm always misplacing loose memory cards. Furthermore, procedures that involve a lot of multi-step copying, editing, and so forth offer lots of potential to erase something that you thought you backed up or for an operation to otherwise fail without your knowledge. Or you might, like me, sometimes just do something really dumb. Also, consider theft and other forms of loss beyond your control.

Add it all up and my guess is that, for most people, minimizing the possibility of human error is more important than incrementally reducing the impact of a potential hardware failure.

With those reliability estimates and human realities as a baseline, here are my thoughts for some reasonable practices:

• If at all economically feasible, carry enough flash memory to hold all your photos. Flash has a good 10x the reliability of hard disks, more when you consider that it's probably going to be OK even if you drop it or run it through the washing machine.
• Common wisdom is that name brands are, in the aggregate, more reliable, and some higher-end cards also come with data recovery software. This seems reasonable. However, I've never seen actual data to bolster this belief--only random stories about crappy off-brand cards purchased on eBay. One data recover company notes that differences in build quality are indeed part of the reliability story but goes on to say it doesn't correlate in any consistent way to brand.
• Because photos can sometimes be recovered from memory cards after they've had a problem, it's a good idea to have at least one backup card. That way, if there's a problem, you can take the card out of the camera and work on it when you get home. Messing with it in the field is a recipe for losing data that could otherwise have been retrieved.
• A lot of people advocate putting fewer eggs in one basket. That is, they suggest using multiple smaller cards rather than one or two larger ones. This is hard to argue against so long as you develop a good system to ensure you don't lose the spare cards or accidentally erase or otherwise mess something up while you're swapping them around. Given overall flash reliability, I don't see this as a particular win--and may even be a net loss if taken to the extreme of some complicated scheme of rotating cards in and out of the camera.
• Although I tend not to bother, making a periodic hard disk backup of your memory cards is good belt-and-suspenders practice. If you're traveling with other people, a hard disk is also a good way to trade pictures. A computer is one possibility. Hard disk-based media players or portable devices specifically designed for the purpose are others.
• If you can't keep everything on flash, then you obviously need to copy it somewhere. Based on the numbers I threw out above, I wouldn't trust a single hard disk backup as my only copy of anything I really cared about. In this case, I'd want either a second hard disk or a way to burn a copy to DVD. (One advantage of making DVDs is that you can potentially mail a copy to yourself at home. (Laptop and DVDs were the solutions that Shankland eventually decided on.) If you have a bunch of spare thumb drives of reasonable capacity laying around, that may be another possibility.
• Cameras break too--maybe more so than any of the other parts we're talking about here, especially if you're in harsh conditions. I'm not sure of the final digital camera mortality rate on the Grand Canyon boating trip I took a couple of years back, but a fair number bit the dust. So definitely consider a backup camera. Sharing memory card format and/or batteries between main and backup is nice, if feasible.

Ultimately, it's all a matter of playing the odds of hardware failure, while keeping in mind all the dumb things that we can do to sabotage ourselves.

When photo site SmugMug initially contacted me, it was in the context of some of the pieces that I had written about competitor Flickr and some of the issues associated with protecting photographers' works online.

In a nutshell, relative to Flickr, SmugMug has opted for less of a open-community orientation than for ways to store and display photos with a rather granular set of access controls. (See some discussion by CEO and "Chief Geek" Don MacAskill.)

These are important topics that I'll be discussing further in due course, but today, I'm going to focus on SmugMug's physical infrastructure.

During my conversation last week with President Chris MacAskill, he made some points about using Amazon.com's Simple Storage Service (S3) that may not be widely appreciated. (S3 is Amazon's "storage as a service" offering that users pay for based on the amount of storage space used and data transferred.

Like Amazon's EC2 compute service, it falls roughly into the "Hardware-as-a-Service" concept.)

SmugMug was one of the earliest S3 users. As Chris tells the story, SmugMug was buying a "mindblowing" number of Xserves from Apple. The Silicon Valley-based company was running out of power and space--the usual story.

However, Chris raised another point that bears mention. The company was having to buy all this gear up-front, in advance of the revenues (i.e. user subscriptions) that it would hopefully generate. This was difficult from a cash flow perspective--especially for a company that wasn't venture capital-backed. But the reality is actually worse.

Not only were the expenses up-front, but they were capital expenses. From an accounting perspective, this means that the depreciation on the systems hit the P&L in a given year. The result? You may look profitable, but cash flow is tight and you could end end up effectively "prepaying" taxes.

Then Amazon called out of the blue, after a conference, and told the site about S3. At Amazon's initial target of 50 cents per gigabyte, it was intriguing. When Amazon ended up pricing its offer at 15 cents, Chris says the company's "jaws dropped."

Initially, SmugMug used Amazon S3 for backup while keeping all of its primary storage in-house. At the beginning, it wasn't thrilled with uptime, but it said that it wasn't disappointed, either. More troubling was that Amazon wasn't so transparent about the time and length of outages, which seems to remain a big issue.

However, over time, SmugMug started seeing better uptime from Amazon than it could deliver in-house. It now has more than 400 terabytes of photo and video storage on S3, and it can add as much as 1TB on busy days.

Now that the company has switched much of its primary storage to S3 as well, there's another economic point worth making. Were SmugMug to host all this storage in-house, it'd actually have to buy more like 1.2 petabytes because it'd need enough to support any growth spurts and enough for backup, as well as primary storage.

With Amazon S3, the company effectively gets backup for "free." (Of course, that assumes that you trust Amazon not to lose data, but as far as I know, there has been no data loss associated with any Amazon outages.)

SmugMug is also a heavy user of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), even though the service is still in beta test mode. One of the most appealing features of EC2, according to Chris, is that it can handle load spikes without paying for the capacity all the time. For example, loads go way up after a three-day holiday weekend, when people upload all their pictures on Tuesday.

All that said, the company does maintain some of its own servers. It does this, in part, to provide a sort of cache for "hot" photos. (Chris estimates that 10 percent of the photos on the site get 90 percent of the traffic.) Related is the fact that SmugMug runs its MySQL database servers in-house (so it'll be physically close to the hot photos.)

Amazon's recently announced SimpleDB could potentially offer an alternative, but it's missing some features that SmugMug's software, as currently written, requires. (See some technical discussion here.)

I suspect that we'll see these hybrid architectures--even at aggressive Cloud Computing adopters--a lot. You sometimes need that little bit of customization or specialization that you can't get from a service that has to be relatively standardized. That said, SmugMug is an aggressive adopter, and it gives us some good insights into what can be gained by making the infrastructure largely someone else's problem.

For all the company's overall success, some of its individual entrants sometimes seem not just lagging and wanting, but sometimes just plain... off.

I'm not so much talking here about sites like Orkut and Google Video that were more-or-less representative of and competitive with social media and video sharing sites (respectively) at the time they came on the scene. They simply didn't rise to the top of the pile for complicated and somewhat elusive reasons that would make for another long discussion.

However, other examples from Google just seem oddly out of tune.

Take Google Browser Sync for example. Social bookmarking may be the red-headed stepchild of social media, as I've written about previously. But that's an opportunity for Google. So what do they do? They come up with some relatively lame mechanism to share bookmarks among multiple computers. I might have found this useful five years ago. However, for many people (especially those who worry about coordinating multiple computers), bookmarks have become something to be stored in the network rather than locally. At least if you aren't storing the content as well as the URL, it's not like they're much use if you're disconnected from the network cloud anyway.

And then there's the peculiar case of Picasa. At the end of the day, Picasa is much more about a simple image cataloging and editing program for the PC than it is a vibrant online photo site. Strip away the client component and it feels awfully first generation--a place to store some snapshots for a few friends and family than a place to participate in an online community. Think Snapfish, not Flickr. Nor does it have any of the more sophisticated tools that sites like SmugMug and PhotoShelter offer to better cater to more serious amateurs and pros.

Indeed, if one were to look at these two examples in isolation, one might be inclined to think that Google doesn't even get social media, Web 2.0, all that good stuff. After all, the counterexamples like the Google Earth community are rather sparse.

But it's worse that that. It can be useful to have a client-side application--that's the reality and, in any case, Picasa has one for reasons of history as much as strategy. But Picasa so often feels like its design center is that offline component rather than the online one. Does Google even have a truly coherent vision of computing in the Cloud?

Google has a decidedly mixed record with its acquisitions (including Picasa). But it's too bad that it's probably not practical at this point just to snap up the Flickr photo site and del.icio.us social bookmarking. Their owner, Yahoo, has certainly never known what to do with them. But Yahoo is a competitor and the tumult around Microsoft's attempted acquisition likely makes any such move impossible. Too bad.

I apparently ruffled some feathers among Flickerites (of which I'm one by the way), when I suggested last week that maybe it wouldn't be so terrible were someone else, even Microsoft, to take a shot at upgrading a service given that Yahoo has shown so little inclination to do so.

Now, I'm by no means convinced that Microsoft is the right company for this particular job. At the same time, I can't help but feel that Flickr has largely stagnated--even if that stagnation feels safe and comfortable to a lot of current users.

There's no doubt that Flickr has some good things going for it:

1. It's a "best seller" in a world where network effects are important. The reasons why it got here aren't especially important. What is important is that it's become the obvious go-to photo-sharing site for much of the world.
2. And, as the mail I've received confirms, it's not just a large community but an often passionate one. A lot of people like not so much Flickr itself, but the network of people who use Flickr to hang out with each other.
3. Flickr has a decent application program interface (API) that allows developers to extend the site in a variety of ways. For example, companies like Zazzle, QOOP, and MOO now offer to print photographs on Flickr using those APIs. Indeed, there's more variety from these third parties using Flickr than is available on many of the sites like Hewlett-Packard's Snapfish, whose main raison d'etre is printing.
4. The free membership option is fairly limited but it lets you try out everything on the site. And the price of the $25 per year "pro" membership is hard to beat when you consider that it doesn't come with either upload or storage limits.
5. Finally, it has some nice extras. CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland recently gave Flickr the best grades for its ability to "geotag" photos with location information. It also has hierarchical sets--that is, it lets you put sets within larger collections--a nice organizational aid as the number of photos you have online grows.

If it sounds like I'm generally positive on Flickr, that's because I am. But it does have some non-trivial shortcomings--especially for users who want greater control over the use of their photos.

1. Today, there are limited mechanisms (essentially one hard-to-find global setting) to control which resolutions of photos the general public, your friends, and your contacts can view and thereby download. This is a serious issue for photographers who are happy to put photos up on Flickr but want to control access to higher resolution versions.
2. No archiving of RAW/DNG originals. This is related to the item above. I see Flickr as serving an off-site archiving function in addition to a share-my-photos one. PhotoShelter is one site that provides this ability. It would even seem like a good incremental revenue opportunity for Flickr.
3. No integrated security watermarking. This continues on the protect-photo-use theme. There are workarounds using APIs external to Flickr but this is a common feature on sites that cater more explicitly to pros.
4. A largely "Web 1.0" look and feel. This is a general observation that Flickr hasn't changed much over the past few years. New settings get buried deep in tabs within tabs. And there's precious little of the sort of interactivity that characterizes many newer sites. (In other words, you largely have to click through to see anything rather than getting a preview when you mouseover a location, for example.)
5. You can't export most of your data. This is part of a much broader Web 2.0 problem that I won't deal with at length here. Suffice it to say that, although photos can be exported through APIs, nothing else (comments, descriptions that aren't part of the photo itself, contacts) can. It's a complicated issue. What data belongs to you? What does information like contacts mean outside of a Flickr context? Suffice it to say that Flickr may not have done less than others to resolve some of these issues but it hasn't done more.

I like Flickr. I do. But it could be much more than it is. Yes, the wrong kind of change could ruin it. But it also can't continue on in essentially a stasis field for the long term.

There are probably too many electrons already being spilt today on Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Yahoo. Rather than delving into the $45 billion aspects of the deal, I'm going to specifically discuss Flickr, Yahoo's popular photo sharing service.

Flickr hasn't been a big part of the general online buzzing about this proposed deal. In part, this is doubtless because it's a small part of Yahoo's financials. It's probably also because most people have at best a vague awareness that Flickr is even a part of Yahoo. Yahoo bought Flickr and has largely left it alone.

However, as Josh Gilbertson notes over on Wired, many Flickr users are "freaking out"--as indeed they also did when Yahoo acquired the company originally.

Josh goes on to write:

One the reasons for concern is that Microsoft's Web properties, while they have their share of adherents, are not exactly leading the pack in terms of UI design, functionality and ease of use, which form the cornerstones of Flickr's popularity.

Another interesting aspect of Microsoft's proposed deal is that Microsoft does not typically go after consumer services like Flickr, which creates a lot of uncertainty for Flickr's future should Yahoo shareholders agree to the acquisition offer.

If Microsoft does buy Yahoo, I suspect that the situation for Flickr will be different from their original acquisition by Yahoo. Under Yahoo, Flickr was largely left to go its own way. As photographer Dan Heller noted in a lengthy post about Flickr and Yahoo just a couple of days ago:

In any event, the conversation went pretty simply: Flickr is really regarded as a completely autonomous tech group with no orders or objectives to do anything other than be a fun place for people to come and socialize about their photos. They have no financial responsibilities back to the mother ship, and Stewart is free to do whatever he wants, with no long-term objectives. When I asked whether there (were) any plans to ever get into licensing or other forms of monetizing its content, he said that Stewart has thought about it, but they are enjoying what they're doing too much and such a move has dubious financial returns in a market already dominated by other very successful companies.

So what I think the various Flickerites are so upset about is that Microsoft might not leave them alone as Yahoo has done.

I think they're right. The question is whether that's such a bad thing.

Contra Josh Gilbertson above, I'm not inclined to give Flickr all that much credit for "UI design, functionality, and ease of use." For example, as CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland notes:

For a Web 2.0 powerhouse, Flickr feels awfully Web 1.0. At least that was my conclusion after spending a few hours in the chat rooms of Photophlow, a start-up that grafts a highly interactive experience on top of Yahoo's photo-sharing Web site.

Flickr has been equally plodding at integrating any number of commonplace features to selectively control access to high-resolution versions of photographs or to institute security watermarks in any form. The shortcomings (and strengths) of Flickr are matters for another post I've been meaning to write. But, suffice it to say, one shouldn't confuse the fact that Flickr is popular in large part because it built up a big community for largely historical reasons with the fact that Flickr is a platform that's objectively great.

(Much the same could be said in spades for del.icio.us--Yahoo's social bookmarking service.)

None of this is to say that Microsoft won't mess things up if they acquire Yahoo and Flickr. But Flickr needs work and Yahoo hasn't helped much either.

As readers of this blog know, two of my interests are photography and open source, so I'm naturally particularly interested in the way the two intersect with each other. As a result, I've been doing a fair bit of reading and thinking about the Creative Commons license in the context of photos and, more broadly, how photos are best protected and shared in an online world. I don't claim to have all the answers, but I wanted to share some threads that I've been researching and pondering.

As I first discussed in a post back in November, the Noncommercial condition in some Creative Commons licenses needs to be clarified. The problem is that noncommercial, in the sense of not associated with making money, is such a vague term in an online world where Google AdSense and other forms of advertising are ubiquitous and so many Web sites and blogs represent some ambiguous intersection of the personal and professional. The Creative Commons organization apparently recognizes that there are issues. On their site, they state that: "In early 2008 we will be re-engaging that discussion and will be undertaking a serious study of the NonCommercial term which will result in changes to our licenses and/or explanations around them."

I can't say that the guidelines in process really clear things up a lot. They seem to pay a lot of attention to US-centric technical distinctions related to what constitutes a nonprofit organization (IRS 501(c)(3)). Many very large and well-funded organizations, such as the National Rifle Association and the Sierra Club, are non-profits. On the other hand, the draft guidelines seem to suggest that some money-making uses are OK so long as it's just an "individual."

With respect to photography specifically, "Commercial" and "Noncommercial" are particularly confusing terms because commercial already has a fairly specific meaning in the context of photography. It mostly applies to photographs used for advertising and marketing purposes--as opposed to editorial or artistic uses. It's an important distinction within photography because commercial photographs typically require things like model releases from subjects whereas other types of photographs do not.

Thus, it seems to me that a Creative Commons definition that focused more on the type of use rather than the type of user could help to clarify things. A Noncommercial license could, for example, prohibit uses that relate to marketing, advertising, and other such uses. It might also prohibit the direct resale of the photo (as, for example, stock sites do).

But, you cry, a magazine like The Economist shouldn't be able to use a Noncommercial image either--even for editorial purposes. 

That's not an irrational position but I'd argue that if Noncommercial is defined to read "not associated with making money," you're effectively prohibiting the vast bulk of uses that aren't already covered under Fair Use (use in academic environment), are trivial (I make a print to hang on my wall at home), or both. Sure, you can have such a license, but why bother? Some personal blogs and MySpace pages might gain access to some photos under such a license but it's a pretty small slice of the possible uses. If you truly don't want anyone to (legally) profit from your photographs however indirectly, there's a simple option: Don't release them under Creative Commons.

Have I convinced you that the above would be a reasonable approach to a Noncommercial Creative Commons license?

If so, I hope you won't be too upset at me for burying my real lede. Because if the above is a reasonable Noncommercial CC license--and I think it is--then we don't need it. And that's actually a good thing because if you take a good look at the Creative Commons license summary page, it's clearly something that only a license geek could love and is far too complex in its Chinese menu approach to be widely understood and accepted.

Let's start with why we don't need the Noncommercial license. One justification for having a Noncommercial is that you don't want your photos used in some big advertising campaign or in a company's annual report without compensation. However, in fact, photographs licensed under Creative Commons licenses of any sort aren't a good fit for commercial photography anyway.

One problem is that they haven't cleared model and property rights as Virgin Mobile Australia discovered. The attribution requirement would be problematic for many other types of uses. (I can't imagine the typical marketing presentation that I see consistently incorporating appropriate bylines as it passes through dozens of hands and revisions.) Dan Heller discusses even more serious problems in this post. I'm not sure I buy into everything Dan writes, but he raises a lot of good issues that, while not limited to commercial photography, are probably most pertinent there.

As for reselling photos licensed under Creative Commons? That seems far better controlled by limiting access to original high-resolution images than it does license terms.

I could also make a variety of arguments against having separate licenses that allow or prohibit changes to an artistic work.

At the risk of oversimplifying, open-source software licenses are mostly concerned with the degree to which derivative works have to be given to the commons. With rare and narrow exceptions, they don't get into who is using the software or the manner in which the code can be changed or extended. That may seem perfectly normal, but that's only because we're so used to it. One can easily imagine an open-source license that says some piece of software can only be used and modified in an academic setting. That such licenses are rare to nonexistent is a large part of why open-source software has become so commonplace.

By contrast, Creative Commons licensing offers up a complicated set of options that seem calculated to encourage people to contribute works to the commons while not pushing their envelope to allow any uses with which they're uncomfortable. While an understandable approach, it creates a system that's far too complicated and doesn't, in my opinion, have any real benefit beyond a simple license that requires attribution and which requires downstream derivatives to maintain the same license.

No one is forcing anyone to put their work into the public commons. But, once you do, you need to accept that you no longer can wholly control how it is used. The open-source software world understands this to its benefit. Now, open-content needs to do the same. The current regime is far too complex to implement and communicate.

I've held off posting about the whole Lane Hartwell, Richter Scales, "Here Comes Another Bubble" brouhaha. I've done so, in no small part, because my own feelings on the topic are...complicated.

On the one hand, I generally favor people sharing their creative output to the degree that it's economically feasible to do so. Our culture is richer and more interesting for the widespread tearing down of walled gardens.

Just to be clear, I'm not advocating some parodic version of free culture in which any content that can be grabbed should be grabbed and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Rather, I'm just suggesting that rigid and unrelenting copyright enforcement for even relatively minor infractions doesn't make me terribly comfortable. (I understand that, for Lane Hartwell, the Richter Scales' use of her photo was a sort of "straw that broke the camel's back" because of past use of her pictures without permission.)

On the other hand, as I've read through some of the commentary and comments in this case, I've gotten a bit irritated. This comment is fairly typical: "A photo of some grinning geek is not protected art. It's a commodity, such as a phone number or the atomic weight of carbon." In other words: eh, it's only a photograph. What's the big deal? As a sometimes photographer, I can't tell you how many times I've run into a similar attitude, even from writers who would have plenty to say if you grabbed a piece they had written and "repurposed" it.

There's also been a great deal of poorly informed commentary about Fair Use. Jason Schultz at LawGeek gives the best rundown of the legal issues in this case that I've seen. I'm not sure, based on a lot of discussions and reading about copyright law in the past, that I agree with his ultimate conclusion (that the use of the photo was probably Fair Use). In any case, as he says, it's a close call in an area of copyright law that is notoriously squishy and very dependent on the specific facts in a given instance. So, if you want to read up on the legal issues involved, I defer to Jason's post.

However, in my view, Jason's most important point has nothing to do with the law.

I'm no Internet ethicist, of course, so I can't really say what the proper ethical outcome should be for this or other similar situations. However, for me, the idea of attribution and promotion have strong appeal. They respect who the artist is and try to help them thrive in their work. I also think ethical online users should consider tithing any financial gain from the use of other people's works back to the original creator--in essence voluntarily offer to post-date royalties if the project amounts to anything profitable. Such steps would, IMO, go a long way to building a stronger online creative community rather than tearing it down or apart.

There are, of course, cases where misappropriation of posted material isn't going to be remedied by adding a photo caption or a byline, but it's often all anyone is looking for. I have no idea whether that would have been sufficient in this particular case or not, but for a lot of us, getting the proper credit is mostly what we're looking for.

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.)