If you have ever published an image or a video online, chances are someone somewhere has stolen your content and used it for free or even worse, has made money off your hard work without any credit or compensation. The Hypocrisy of Piracyĭealing with piracy is nothing new for most photographers and videographers. After a few weeks of serving the fake files, we were shocked that people were actually downloading and resharing the tutorial as if it was the real thing.
Once we uploaded the torrent files, we had a bunch of friends download it, seed it, and even leave positive comments to help promote the whole series to the top of the search results. The file structure was designed to look exactly like a normal copy of Photographing the World and the fake lesson was listed as lesson one. In order to make the tutorial seem legit, we packaged it up with a bunch of fluff material so the entire download was 20-30 GB of data.
Once we created this fake lesson, we then had to seed it on a few torrent sites.
You can watch the full, unedited lesson on how to photograph an Olive Garden in the video below. Let's just say that by the end of the post-production section of this lesson, it becomes abundantly clear that this is not a real lesson from Photographing the World 3. Once the final images were captured, we then wanted Elia to take all of the photos into Photoshop just as he does normally and teach exactly how to edit and composite everything into one portfolio-worthy image. What starts off as a pretty serious exploration of an Italian restaurant quickly becomes more and more ridiculous as Elia is faced with billboards, urban distractions, traffic, employees, and other environmental elements found on location. Everything from scouting, to composition, to gear used, and even the local history was included in the lesson just as he does in his real, full-length tutorials. We wound up filming an entire lesson outside the Olive Garden in North Charleston, South Carolina, and Elia did not hold anything back. Therefore, for this fake lesson, we thought it would be funny if instead of heading to Italy for the first lesson, we brought Italy to the viewer! The Fstoppers team packed up all our gear and headed to the most popular Italian location not in Italy: Olive Garden.Įlia using a "parking lot lake" to create a beautiful reflection However, one of the biggest complaints people have (yet also one of the biggest praises about the series too) is that we travel to exotic locations that many photographers do not have access to themselves.
When Elia traveled to Charleston, South Carolina to film the final post-processing sections of Photographing the World 3, it became pretty clear where this final lesson would be filmed.Įlia's Photographing the World series has been one of the most successful photography educational tutorials we have ever produced. As we traveled from destination and country to country, we continued to brainstorm exactly what this fake lesson would look like and where we would film it. However, by the end of the video, Elia would acknowledge that this copy of the tutorial was in fact pirated and that the viewer had unfairly stolen the content from Elia himself. The idea was sort of a " Rickroll" where Elia would teach what would appear to be a legit lesson. While we were filming throughout Italy, Dubai, and North America, we came up with the idea of releasing a fake lesson and seeding it on torrent websites. Back in winter of 2017, Fstoppers teamed up with Landscape Photographer Elia Locardi to produce the third installment in his Photographing the World series.