Earlier this week, Nikon and Joe McNally announced something called the Nikon Wedding Truck. As part of the new #iamgenerationimage campaign they brought a truck into New York City and parked it in front of City Hall. Any couple who brought their certificate of marriage dated between June 1st-5th 2015 received free portraits from Joe.
Joe started photographing yesterday morning and finished off today. Now, from a marketing standpoint, I completely understand the reasoning behind Nikon running this wedding truck campaign. They are targeting families at their earliest stages. If these couples decide to start a family, or already have one, most likely they are going to be purchasing a camera to document their lives. We all know the biggest decision they will make is trying to decide between Nikon and Canon. So kudos to Nikon for trying to interject themselves in that decision. Here's some of today's photos that Joe took.
Jon Lemon, a NYC photographer, was the hired photographer for the first couple to go through the Nikon Wedding Truck. Jon was able to document the process of his couple going through the wedding truck and the post interview process. Jon explained the process of how his couple got photographed through the truck.
I met up with my couple outside the Marriage Bureau as they got out of their cab, and they were quickly approached by a Nikon person to see if they wanted to participate in the Wedding Truck photos. Since they had to wait for a friend to arrive anyway, we hopped over and started the process. They had a makeup station set up in case it was needed, but we skipped that and were scooted right over to Joe. Turns out they were his first couple of the project! After a few minutes shooting with Joe, they sat down for a quick interview to share their love story. We then went into the Marriage Bureau to get married and when we came out 30 minutes later, a USB drive was waiting for them with final images.
The following images were taken by Jon Lemon. 
via Glamour
That last shot...
Today is our anniversary. A time to reflect back on that day. Of course, we have no album to go through, because our photographer sucked.
that feeling when backstage pics looks better than main pics
Looking at McNally's photographic background, I'm at a loss as to why Nikon thought he would be an ideal wedding photographer...
It's publicity. He can do a decent job for wedding but the main idea is :
1- Have a giant Nikon logo
2- Have a giant of the photography world.
3- Spread the word that nikon did this cool thing.
It worked very well!
I understand it's publicity, but not choose a real wedding photographer to do the job?
"It worked very well!"
How do you know?
McNally is a Nikon ally for a long time. Obvious choice and he's probably personnal friend with the person in charge of hiring the photographer for the stunt.
As far as wroking, it's picking up speed and we're discussing it, no?
Picking up speed, what do you mean by this? How do you verify this? Our discussing this has no bearing on the success or failure of the project.
Well, it does. In french they say "faire couler l'encre" which translate to "making the ink flow" though it's not as pretty once translated.
Being it's a publicity stunt, making "henadlines" of photo blogs and being shared, liked etc, makes it a success.
the amount of likes/shares and what not decides if it's a big or a small success.
What I mean is, the quality of the pictures is not the main objective here. Talking about it, is.
Well, I don't share that mindset. How it affects the people involved would make it a success or failure. What we have to say about it means jack.
We don't have any way to quantify what kind of affect it had on the subjects. While I'm sure they were pleased to get their photos taken, we have no way of knowing if that would translate to sales of Nikon products by those people, and if THEIR word-of-mouth would.
That would be the ONLY reason to do something like that. As professionals, we already know what we want or not. The Nikon Wedding Truck isn't going to convince anyone reading this to buy more gear or, probably more to the point professionally, switch brands to Nikon because of it.
An informed customer wouldn't I agree.
But since Nikon make most of their sales with consummer level DSLR, I'm willing to bet those entry level buyers could get swayed (consciously or not).
Your argument is basically that modern publicity/marketing doesn't work. While I find it hard to believe it does, I'm pretty sure companies woulnd't sink that much money into it if it didn't pay off...
No, my argument is that you're making claims about things happening that can't be quantified.
For Nikon's sake I hope this has some effect, but it strikes me as a very narrow focus. Someone elsewhere has mentioned this was actually McNally's idea, and in that respect it strikes me as publicity more for McNally than for Nikon.
To be fair, these aren't wedding photos, these are portraits, and Joe has always been a really great portrait shooter. Until now apparently.
I could not agree more.
second that!
We're thinking about visiting NYC on a .5 anniversary. We were married in December 1977, but we'd prefer to visit NYC when the weather is better, like May or June.
Yawn.
So sad.. The behind the scenes photos are way better than the actual wedding photos.
Move the background to the end of the truck, use higher focal length and bam, perfect picture with daylight studio!
What a cool thing, having Joe McNally shoot your wedding day portrait. Love the extra soft light, octa through a scrim. No Profoto lights for this project. Not sure about wearing blue jeans while covering a wedding day, but Joe's always a charming guy.
unimpressed!
Here's a link to Joe's blog where he explains how this event came to be:
http://blog.joemcnally.com/2015/05/27/the-wedding-truck/