My March 7 blog featured a model of one of the staged new car publicity shots that were so popular in the 1950s and 1960s complete with one of the ubiquitous Foster and Kleiser billboards. Although the billboards are clearly ads, there was some hard-to-define “something” that made them captivating. I decided to revisit the photo and alter it with two experiments.
First, I had another F&K billboard image that I really liked. My first inclination was to make a model of the second billboard and take another photo. That would be doable but a fair amount of work. I wondered if I could simply photoshop the other billboard into the image. To my surprise that worked pretty easily. (use Adobe’s “distort” tool to wrangle it around).
The second issue was cropping. Sacrificing compelling content for the good of the whole is tough, whether it be movie editing, book editing, photography, or model railroad design. In the original photo, I included the crossbucks to suggest the rail element. In a hard-to-describe way that was an overreach that detracted from the photo. In version 2, I cropped in tighter which highlighted the automobiles. The end result was a much better image.
Here’s the first photo showing the original billboard as well as the portion of the shot I cropped out.