Niki and me > First time at the cottage > 04.24.10

A Saturday afternoon trip with the camera over to the old church.

I don't think Speilberg's set designers and art directors could create a period location as magical as this. However idealized, the pictures leave you with a right and good feeling.

reveries.com says this about Elgin Park:

Elgin Park, exists only on Flickr -- and in the mind of Michael Paul Smith, reports Jim Koscs in the New York Times (3/14/10). Elgin Park, in reality, "is an imaginary ... steel-mill town where the calendar is frozen at 1964." Michael created Elgin Park by combining his love of "1/24-scale diecast" cars and trucks with "his skills at architectural model-making and photography, along with his love for detail." He has built about a dozen scale models of circa 1964 houses and buildings, and accessorized them with his collection of some 300 die-cast cars and trucks.

Michael then photographs his models outdoors, using mother earth as his backdrop and father sky for lighting. The result is so stunning that his creations attract upwards of 750,000 pageviews per day, totaling some 20 million views on Flickr since January (images). The result is so good that some accuse Michael of using Photoshop, but he says he's used Photoshop only to make some of the images look older. He finds his outdoor sets in and around his hometown of Winchester, Mass., but says his inspiration is actually his boyhood home of Sewickley, Pa., "a real steel-mill town a few miles north of Pittsburgh."

All I say is, unbelievable work.

Reductionism is your best friend in advertising.

Here, common, cookie-cutter thinking would have blathered on about technology,

tone of voice guidelines and other corporate gobblygook.

Instead, they saved the technical stuff for the web site.

The authenticity test for trial and service.

And fear for the boardroom.

If they fail.

More than likely, OMAX will make money on this product investment. As they should.

*My wife is a photographer and she wants one.

The message has gone viral.

I'm not being paid.

* In case your (PC) nose is out of joint, This is a demo. Idea is not limited to execution.