Picture of the week #4
Originally uploaded by kirispupis.
OK, I admit I am a bit late with the picture for this week. I didn't have any great shots over the weekend so I thought I would blog about a much earlier shot.
My wife is currently a real estate agent and we are working on an advertisement for her for a local publication. This publication has a lot of real estate agents advertising and all of them use the standard 'agent in front of a house' picture. Nelya and I wanted to do something 'out of the box' so we went through my pictures and selected this one with the headline "Is buying or selling a house putting you in a bad mood?".
Last night I created a mock up of the advertisement and today we showed it to about twenty people to get their impressions. Everyone agreed that the monkey was catchy but almost half said the monkey is not relevant to real estate.
A number of people really liked the monkey though so we are going to try rearranging the rest of the ad - possibly making the monkey image a little smaller and try that out.
In terms of how the shot was taken this is actually a wild monkey that I took on Monkey Island on a boat tour in Thailand. The monkeys there are wild but come out for food when tourist boats arrive. I used my Sigma 80-400 3.5-5.6 lens at 400mm to get this shot and I happened to get the monkey in the middle of a snarl. This just shows that it's wise with animals to take a lot of shots - I just wish I had taken more because the monkeys were very photogenic but I was not very shutter happy. I didn't need to use a long telephoto for these monkeys - they gladly took food from our hands - but I wanted to for the depth of field effect.
In the ad I have photoshopped out the black spot on the left. In general I never photoshop pictures on flickr - if you want the full sized Photoshopped version you need to pay for that.
I would be curious to hear any opinions about the monkey though and how your would react to such an ad.