Canon Was Here...

The Canon company are conducting a contest for photographers. They have a red flyer here at the shop promising 75 trips in 75 days - if you spend more than $ 90 on any Canon products you go into the draw for holiday vouchers  - these look to be vouchers for a major airline and for an organized travel company. It is not a cheap affair - they are promising some $ 200,000 worth of these trips to photographers in Australia and New Zealand.


You'll have until the 18th of January 2013 to do your purchasing and the draws will be held daily - they started on the 5th of this month, though the little flyer does not say which trips are to be given away on which day. I shall be particularly interested to see where they send the persons who win on the 7th of December.

You see the advertising images and write-up on the front of the page show pictures of two places-separated by 75 years:

 One is of Times Square in New York City  - the new picture is in colour and is evidently pre-Hurricane Sandy as everything is lit up and dry. The advertising agency are a little bit myopic as they have also included a picture of Times Square but have failed to see that it has 1952 cars and a sign proclaiming a presidential win by Eisenhower. Atmospheric, but not quite right.

They got the second set right, though. It is two pictures of Waikiki Beach on Oahu. And right under the black and white illustration ( oddly free of big hotels ) is the line " Canon was here in 1937 ".

Well, you can bet they sure as hell were. Slung round the necks of surprisingly fit young Japanese men bicycling around the island on holiday. Taking lots of pictures- lots and lots of pictures...Schofield Barracks, Wheeler and Hickam Air Fields, Pearl Harbour, Ford Island...Oh, so many pictures.

Smart people, the advertising types. Sensitive. Thinkers, to a man. And inspiring. Give you all sorts of ideas for similar promotions based on air travel and optics. Why stop at cameras - why not involve major aircraft and instrument makers for real nostalgia. I can see it now - Bausch and Lomb or Sperry could offer a contest for purchasers of their sunglasses or electronic gear that entitles you to fly over famous cities - Ploesti, Schweinfurt, and Regensburg in the daylight or Hamburg and Berlin at night.

Or for those who want to travel in the east, there is always Tokyo after dark in April...or Hiroshima on a bright August morning. I can see a real boom in this sort of contest.