The first one is questionable at best, this one is hilarious.
You're right, there's no sign at all that the octa in the BTS has had anything to do with that image.
It may be hilarious, but IMO it's also deceptive.
Here we have a very well-known lighting company that makes perfectly good equipment, and they then produce finished images that masquerade as shots which were produced using that equipment, when in fact they were not.
I don't have any inside knowledge of what's going on here but my guess is that they employ lighting experts who are either not consulted about the adverts or whose input is ignored, which if I was them would seriously embarrass me...
And they market to high end professionals who honestly believe that there is something special about their products, and who presumably can see at a glance that their advertising shots are fake - what's that about?
And they aren't alone either, about 3 years ago, whilst trying to get ideas for our own catalogue, I looked at a catalogue from another well known lighting maker (not Bron or Elinchrom) and nearly all of their photos were fakes too. Most of them were composites, so badly done that my cat could have done better (even though I don't have a cat) and yet they were passing these images off as genuine shots produced with their equipment. I will, when necessary, comp images, but I will never do it to deceive people that they were lit differently. Phil V was with me on a shoot where we wanted a goose to pose in a shot, the bloody geese wouldn't cooperate so we comped in a goose, I think that's OK because a genuine goose could have been in the shot if I'd waited long enough and if I'd had something better to offer than supermarket bread
But, in that shot, we used lighting to turn a brilliant summer day into a rainy day, and that was all done honestly, in camera.
Don't misunderstand me, I am 100% in favour of using PP to turn excellent photos into outstanding ones, and I never hesitate to use PP to carry out enhancements that can't be done in camera. And, with our videos, we've got a clever guy who does wonders in after effects, it's necessary.
BUT I would never use PP to "create" lighting - why would I when I have the lighting tools, and the skills, to get it right in camera in a fraction of the time that it takes in PP? Lighting is real time, in real space, with 3 dimensions.
And every single shot that I produce in our Learning Centre Tutorials is totally unretouched, because people can't learn lighting from looking at shots that have been "repaired" or enhanced.
OK, I'm an old man who was formally trained in the skills that are now dying out, back in the day when computer retouching didn't exist, maybe I'm totally out of step with reality and maybe we can all throw our lights away, shoot on our camera phones, rely on PP and call ourselves professionals, but maybe there's a little bit of sense to what I say. Even if I have got it totally wrong, at least my approach is ethical and my work is real.
Photographers, wake up! Increasingly we are selling lighting to trade customers who are now doing their own product photography, not because it saves them money but because so many photographers simply aren't capable of producing the quality and consistency that they need.7 complete kits went outy to these customers just today. And, even more worryingly, more and more companies are ditching photography altogether and are turning to images that are entirely rendered on computer - again because there are so few skilled photographers out there. It has nothing to do with money, because 3D rendering is a slow and therefore expensive process.
