Do not hire this photographer!

My work recently hired a photographer to take some shots of products, people, etc. They paid a rather handsome sum (more than I earn in a month) for his 4-6 hours of work. I'm told he was reasonable to get along with, and at the time they seemed happy with him.

Then his contact sheets arrived, and I was shown them. Disgruntled engineers and managers had written less than savoury comments in the margins about how boring the shots were, and how they could take better ones (and to tell the truth, some had!).

I have to admit that the shots were indeed boring; yes, the subject matter is extremely dull, but a good photographer can make it exciting nonetheless. There were shots in there of a particular security unit that we manufacture, which I myself had taken shots of a month or so earlier. The engineer had been quite fussy at the time, wanting exact reflections on a shiny black strip down the side. I had been unable to achieve it with my lack of decent lighting, but made up for it with Photoshop; fixed up reflections, dust, bad colour from the lights, blurred logos, etc. 

The shots taken by the professional photographer had a similar angle and lighting, yet was ill refined. Reflections had not been carefully handled, logos were out of focus. At the time I just assumed that he, like I, was going to Photoshop the ones selected as finals. 

Then today I received one of the "finals" for a different product that I was to put into an ad. I took one look, picked up the phone, and made sure that this was, in fact, one of the 
shots that the photographer had sent through. It was.

There did not appear to be any Photoshop work done at all. The levels were untouched, dust covered the unit and laptop. Greasy fingerprints covered everything. The colour balance was incorrect. The laptop screen was horribly blue. Logos were blurred. Angles had not been carefully considered, and so the top of the screen was at an unpleasing tilt and perspective.

Later I was told that he normally gets our company's out-sourced designers to photoshop his photos, and does not do it himself!

Basically, we're never using him again. 

And I would like to warn anyone in Adelaide to not use him as well. Perhaps his photography of other subjects is better; but one must question his professionalism given the above circumstances. One must wonder at a photographer who either refuses or cannot use Photoshop when the photography on its own is not sufficient.

And I would like to note that none of this is libel. Every thing is factual, and I can show the photo
on request, as well as my Photoshopped version.

And after all that, here is the link to his site.

http://www.davidmariuz.com.au/

His work appears good enough at first glance; the compositions seem nice. Some of the pictures I will admit to liking; despite the faults.

But for the price that he charged, I would expect more. And I would definitely expect him to photoshop his own photos.

Copying Pictures from Word to Photoshop (or anywhere else)

One thing that frustrated me no end about my job is that Engineers and Technical Writers do everything in Word. Ok, maybe not everything; but just about.

You wouldn't believe the number of times I was told to make a brochure (sticking to our dull and disgustingly purple corporate standard of course) and given no more than a Word document full
of bullet points and embedded image. Actually, if you're in a similar position, maybe you would. But in any case, I found getting those images out an absolute nightmare!

I don't know if you've tried this, and if it's any different in Word 2007, but in 2003 and earlier
you can't just copy and paste those images straight out of Word into Photoshop. It has a seizure
and loses colours somewhere in between. My solution was to make the pic full size, screencap it, paste it into Photoshop, stitching together if required, and then going from there.

After much delving into countless forums and blogs and other unspeakables, I finally found the answer, and now I want to share it around. I want everyone to know this, in case they are handed a Word doc and expected to deal with it. 

Copy from Word, paste into Powerpoint. From there, you can recopy for a perfect paste into Photoshop, or even just right-click and save directly as a jpg or whatever. It sometimes helps to reset the image in Word's image format options first, or your image may get shrunk in the
wash. 

So, there you have it. Pass it on. It will come in handy to someone one day, and they will  be 
glad that you told them. Promise.

Welcome to my Blog!

Hi there.

I've avoided a blog for a long time. I didn't have anything to say that I thought anyone would be interested in.

But now I do. I work as a Technical Illustrator / Graphic Designer / PC Monkey at a large Defence company. Working as a designer around engineers is probably one of life's most painful experiences. At least I hope so, because now everything can only look up!

I will try not to litter this blog with my opinions. What do you care for those? However, there's plenty of tips I want to impart on the world; things which can generally be found, but only in the deep recesses of the internet. And, of course, that which all design blogs ultimately exist for; the posting of Random Cool Things.

Anyway, we'll see how this goes. With any luck, you might get something from here, and share it around. I don't care if people read this. I care if people get the information.