Too Good To Be True Seattle Gets Face Lift In Doctored Photo For Ad Campaign

The photo from the ferry’s stern is of a spectacular Seattle skyline, the Space Needle prominent in the foreground, Mount Rainier serenely watching over all beneath a cloudless, cobalt sky.

An impossibly beautiful day - with the emphasis on impossible.

Though it apparently makes an effective promotion for state tourism, the photo in the state’s ad campaign belies its slogan, “The place you’ve been trying to get to.”

You can’t get there from here, and a good thing, too. If the photograph were accurate, the ferry actually would be floating several hundred feet above Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood - a situation requiring extraordinarily high tides and astonishingly bad navigation.

Furthermore, Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill and its pricey view homes would have to vanish.

OK, OK, acknowledges Barbara Dunn, spokeswoman for the state Department of Community, Trade and Economic Development, the ad agency “took a little creative license.”

“You could see it if you could see through Queen Anne Hill,” insists David Sharp, vice president of account services at CF2GS in Seattle, which created the advertisements.

The photo and three companion ads are running in publications throughout the West. Accuracy aside, the state is pleased with the results of the campaign that began early this year.

The ads promote an Internet site and toll-free number to receive a free state travel guide. Dunn says requests for the guides have doubled this year to 1 million. Sharp claims the ads helped move Washington state into the nation’s top 10 vacation destinations.

Dunn said there have been only a few calls questioning the picture’s accuracy, mostly from journalists.

The agency used a photo taken from the heights of Queen Anne, north of the Seattle Center, and looking south. Artists at CF2GS did some digital manipulation on a computer, removing the hill and adding a band of greenery and a Puget Sound beach, and splicing a photo showing blue water, the ferry’s wake and car deck into the foreground. Shadows of two bicyclists are cast onto the deck.

Kathi Elliott, CF2GS supervisor of the state’s account, says the shadows were shot separately and transferred by computer to the deck. That explains why the bikers’ shadows are vertical, while shadows of the skyline appear to fall toward the left.

“Digitally, we were trying to make it something that the consumer would see and recognize as all the attractions of Seattle,” Elliott said.

“The idea was to show a quintessential view of Seattle,” Sharp added, even though the photo implies the ferry docks at the Space Needle’s base, about a half-mile inland and a couple hundred feet above sea level.

The three other ads in the campaign, done under a $1 million, two-year contract for the state’s print and television advertising, have much less electronic tinkering. They show Lake Wenatchee, Ruby Beach and Mount Rainier.

Actually, there is precedent for removing large chunks of Seattle’s topography. At the turn of the century, developers used high-pressure hoses to convert Denny Hill, south of Queen Anne, to the Denny Regrade, sluicing about 100 feet of the hill into Elliott Bay.

Had they kept hosing farther north, the ad’s view would be accurate - provided, of course, that all of north Seattle washed out with the tide.