70's Fender Ad - What Were They Thinking?

[davegardner0]

And can you imagine how tough it must have been back then to take a photograph, and have no idea what it looked like until you got it back from Photo Hut and week or two later?

Those poor people....

Very interesting point!

I used to do some product photography for our e-commerce website where I work... I can't imagine shooting "blind" with film! It would easily have been 10x harder just because you can't check out lighting changes in real time. The people who did it must have really known what they were doing, and even still their photos don't look as good as what we can do today just because of the equipment.

I'm into photography a bit and still shoot film for fun but it's really only practical for certain things and product photos are definitely NOT one of them!

 

[swarfrat]

Hours... I imagine most guys shooting magazines and catalogs were probably shooting medium format slide film, and developing themselves at the end of the day. Never done slides or color at home but I do have a mess of 120 B&W still. I bet the kiddo would love to see that.

 

[Seamas]

The main thing that always comes to my mind when I see old magazine ads is the sheer amount of text. Some of them had literal paragraphs of text. These days, the less text the better.

You go back to the 1890-1910s and you'll have 400 word essays as advertising.

http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/music-ads-1900s

 

[Seamas]

The features they talk about are SO not what's popular today. First of all, they actually brag about how thick their finish is! "Fender Thick-Skin", hah. And on the Tele bass ad at least, they never once mention what kind of wood the body is made from.

I have a mid-1970s Strat. Not sure if it is the original finish, but it IS thick.

What's more, it is made from "heavy ash" and weighs a ton.
I think the mentality was "Les Pauls are heavy and they sustain like crazy, so if we make the Stratocaster really heavy it will sustain too!"
Wasn't sustain one of the reasons why brass nuts and bridges were so popular in the 70s-80s?