Photo Fakeouts: Reality is Dark and Crowded

Oyster.com is a website that publishes hotel reviews for popular travel destinations. Apparently they have a team of people who run around to these hotels and stay in the rooms and eat the room service and go in the pools and take pictures of everything so that you can see what it's actually like to be there. First of all, sign me up for that job, etc. Secondly, I feel like Oyster.com is a terrible name. I had spent probably 15 minutes on the website before I realized oh, they mean "The World is Your Oyster." I'm sorry, but it just makes me think of slimy mollusks.

But anyway, they have this great feature called Photo Fakeouts. They take promotional images of hotel pools, rooms and beaches, and run them alongside pictures that their staff actually took when they visited the hotel.

I think this is just a stunning example of how staging and some Photoshop can make an average picture look completely different and enticing. The fakeouts are not egregious, but something like changing the color and light quality of the sky, showing an uncharacteristically empty beach, or pulling the old "pool trick" create images that are not representative of the experience you will have when you visit.

Here are some of my favorites:



Oops! Instead of your girlfriend's french braid, the beach has gigantic cranes. And it's dark. And there are other people on it.



I would not expect a hotel room to look exactly like, or ever particularly like, the picture in a brochure, but this is barely recognizable as the same place.



The promotional picture is so 80s, I love it! After the buffet, the promotional picture is going to a jazzercise class. Also, gross.



Poor little pool! Can you imagine if you were this pool posing for your big photo shoot, and you're so excited, and then finally the pictures are released, and you're like "This doesn't look like me at all!" Then you would burst into tears, but no one would know, because you are a pool.

Via Lifehacker