It's not so much staying alive, it's staying human that's important. To the past, or to the future. To an age when thought is free.
Ben. Freelance Photographer & Designer as Utter Media and Creative Specialist & Developer for global ESP company.
All original content is copyright Ben Horsley
So after almost 7 years of gradually hand-crafting a unique and vibrant portfolio, I’ve finally reached a peak of confidence; enough to finally give my freelance brand that push it deserves.
Utter Media, which began as Utter Photography in 2004, has catalogued me a fine selection of photoshoots and design projects. Indoors, outdoors, home, abroad, hot, cold, paid, pro-bono, each individual assignment has been a pleasure and a challenge, and so far, never a disaster.
Last week I submitted Utter Media Limited to the government register for incorporation. This week I gained my first two permanent clients. Next week I’ll have my company account up and running. So far, everything has been invoiced as a personal endeavor. From now on, it’s account books and contracts.
Not a whole lot will change, but the sheer excitement and motivation taken from the last two weeks has given me that final push that I need to start taking this whole thing a lot more seriously and to start laying some serious work down on the table.
I’ve met some brilliant people through various ventures, and am lucky to be surrounded by truly gifted creative types who are embarking on their own fruitful careers in design, photo, music, fashion and marketing. And years from now, we’ll all meet up in some wanky bar somewhere and laugh at our first designs, photos, songs, and projects. Here’s to that day.
Design, concept and messaging by Ben Horsley.
The Modern Megapixel Myth
Imagine image 1 to be taken from a 5.7MP camera and image 2 a 12.8MP camera. Olympus or Sony will have you believe that camera 2 is twice (2.25x, to be specific) as good as camera 1, and that the images are twice as good. Because it produces images with twice as many megapixels.
They are right, camera 2 produces twice as many megapixels. But look at the image above. The extra 7.1 megapixels that camera 2 boasts are used to expand the image wide as well as tall. So with twice as many megapixels you are not getting detail and quality 2.25x better than camera 1. If you look at the measurements of the photo from camera 2, it’s only .5x bigger than those of camera 1.
Don’t be a mug, don’t go out and buy a 10MP camera because you think it’s “twice as good” as a 5MP model. The amount of people that boast their megapixels over lesser predecessors is comedic. A camera twice as good as camera one would need to be 22.8MP.
This one’s for free.
“Brutal Simplicity, Simple Brutality”
I guess it was inevitable that the quickfire ingredients of what is essentially an advertisement for advertising were hip invention, big-idea philosophy and ambiguous craft.
Art & Copy is a 2009 documentary film stalking the industry from the lo-res cut-and-dry late-70s through to the high-definition multibillion iconic modern age settling. Out of the starting blocks distinguished cash rich brands such as Apple, Volkswagen, Coke, Nike et al put their money and trust in young new creative agencies fraternizing in white-plaster New York offices.
Not only was advertising back then an unwritten language, there was only one ever-so-slightly proven formula of “tell the consumer what it does”. Almost over night Tommy Hilfiger was born and everyone knew about it. The brand stood shoulder to shoulder with Calvin Klein not through climbing the ranks, but by osmosis of the human mind; billboards, TV ads, and PR.
With Apple and Volkswagen back then being probably just as evokative and enigmatic as they are in todays ads, this documentary really opens your eyes to just how many heartstrings, how much empathy and how little time a message has to prove itself to you.
Whether you and I like it or not, advertising bombards us all day fucking long. The cynical and cocksure side of me would love to say that advertising doesn’t really have a profound effect on what I buy, but I can think of half a dozen instances where it had me hook, line and sinker. Walking off an American plane, into an American airport in an American state, the first American billboard I saw was one for Pepsi. What was the first thing I bought once I passed through customs? You got it. Suckerpunched.
- The food industry spends $34 billion on ads a year
- The average city-dweller receives 5000 ad messages a day
- Next year the advertising agency will be worth $544 billion
- The average child sees 20,000 TV ads in a year
From a business and financial point-of-view I find it just startling. From a creative and design point-of-view it enthralls me. If you work in marketing, PR, advertising, or the sales of any of the aforementioned services, after watching Art & Copy you will want to march to work the next day and kick some serious drawing-board ass [sic]. I sure do.
Advertising isn’t just about commercialism and consumerism, really it isn’t. MTV was bought by all the major cable companies in the US only because the US public bombarded the switchboards with calls. Public perception is not what an advertiser should be thinking about after the dispatch of his advert. They should be looking at public perception before they even start work on the advert.
Sadly though, it’s not always the case. Like Doug Pray said, 95% of adverts are bad. And what better day to type this blog than today, when a conservative capitalist party comes into power in the UK.
