September 08, 2007 – Robert Morrissey Photographer & Inventor
Rob M: And that’s just the makeup part of it. What we can do with Photoshop that is, is literally take in the waist, we can lengthen the face, shorten the arms, change the fingers. We can actually take any part of a person’s body and change it with another part. There is nothing that we can’t do in Photoshop nowadays.
Rob: Arm coming out of the back and…
Rob M: The thing is, this actually goes into a theory of mine that everything has become so perfect visually that we ignore it. This is a major problem in many, many large ad campaigns. If you look at how you look at ads, a lot of people find that this is what they do. They’ll look at it and say, “This is not real,” and they’ll look away and it actually becomes a negative situation. I think that’s because a lot of people are being educated on what actually can be done.
Twenty years ago everybody was shocked that this stuff could be done. Ten years ago everybody was kind of embracing, “Oh, that’s cool it can be done.” We can do anything to a photograph and now its technology is so inexpensive, everybody’s got the technology that it’s everywhere. So, all of a sudden we have this huge outbreak of human beings saying, “Everything is too perfect. This is not real. I won’t buy it.”
Rob: So, ugly is back in now?
Erin: Ugly is the new black.
Rob M: Well, the funny thing is it’s not even ugly. It’s just being real. People don’t like being lied to. We all feel that large corporations lie to us.
Rob: They do.
Rob M: I know I probably should have said flat out, “Large corporations lie to us.” What happens is, they’re lying to us from the very moment their company’s introduced. You know, a billion-dollar ad campaign, everything is completely fake in it and it’s all a lie.
Rob: So, you’d say for an entrepreneur, try to be real, not fake and don’t lie.
Rob M: I would say that’s a great way of doing it. When you come back to the BioMediGraph website, I’m just being real. This is what we do. I photograph a lot of food and I don’t think the food industry people ever not lie about food because when you photograph food incorrectly it’s just unappetizing.
Rob: Hmmm…food.
Erin: It’s so funny when you’re standing in the line at like Burger King or something and you’re looking at this juicy burger, then you get it and you’re like, “Oh.” So disappointing.
Rob M: And the thing is, that’s happened across the board with everything.
Erin: And people expect it now, which is kind of sad.
Rob M: Exactly. The thing is, people I think five years ago expected it and it was sad. Now people are fighting back against it and they want realistic representation. It’s not hard for us to ask, as a buyer to ask for that.
Erin: We want a pretty hamburger.
Rob M: Right.
Erin: Just like in the picture.
Rob M: Right. Well, there’s a level. I can give you a pretty hamburger that represents what you’ll probably get. Or I can spend five days photographing a plastic mold and tell you that it’s a hamburger and that you’ll never get that. The thing is, do you want your customer to feel upset when they get your product after they’ve seen something. You never want to let your customer down and say, “Hey, by the way, this is this great thing that you could have got, but we actually can’t deliver, so here’s what you get instead.”
