Thank you ever so much, stock photo companies, for providing relatively cheap images for us budget-constrained art directors and designers to use. But for the love of all that is holy, STOP EDITING THE FUCKING PHOTOS FOR US! I went to art school. I’ve done the whole illustration/design thing for a while now. I think I know how to “artistically” crop a photo or applying effects. I don’t need you fuckwits cropping off half of some woman’s face or the top of some guy’s head for me! Maybe some self-publishing do-it-all fanzine editor needs some help with photo editing, but I don’t. I also don’t need you to desaturate the photos or put any filters on the lens or apply any Photoshop filters or any of that stuff. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve needed an image of a specific type of person doing a specific activity only to find that the only available images I have of that type have been “helpfully” edited for me, effectively limiting my options or even making the image unusable in the project entirely. GAHHH!!!
So what you’re saying is that you’re paying hardly anything for pre-packaged photos to use in your job as a budget constrained art director, and yet you’re not happy with the product? Regardless of the fact you’re paying hardly anything? Seems to me this is a classic case of getting what you pay for I rather think.
What is it with you, Boo? It seems no one is allowed to express dissatisfaction with anything without you coming along and shitting in their thread. Why don’t you get a hobby, like pulling wings off flies, or something?
Exaggeration much? What silly nonsense. GO and check my posts in other threads and other forums. Come back after you get a sense of relativity once again. THere are at least 25 threads boiling away in the PIT right now where people trashing people and trashing each other’s styles where I’ve not said a word, nor do I intend to. Most importantly, check my above post compared to yours. I specifically adhered to the content of the thread. Nothing personal whatsover. Did you? Physician heal thyself I say.
I’m going to try to cure your ignorance.
First of all, the problem I am complaining about is common among most of the stock photos that are available, regardless of price. Check stockbyte or photodisc or rubberball or any number of other companies, and you’ll see that they’re all doing the same kinds of things: cropping and modifying photos unnecessarily. That is the crux of the problem.
Second: I’m not talking about free or cheap photos here. I’m sorry if the phrase “budget constrained” misled you. While I, personally, am paying nothing out of pocket for the photos, my company has paid several thousand dollars for a stock photo library. I think we have over $15,000 invested in photos from just one of the stock companies. I’m “budget-constrained” because I work in the profit-generating arm of a major hospital and, to the bean counters, the cost-to-profit margin is Almighty. The reason “budget constrained” comes into play is that, although we have the capability of going to yet another in-house graphics department to get new photos shot, the cost of doing so would put most of our book projects over budget by quite a bit. So the word coming down from the top is, “you have several thousands of dollars of photos to use, use them.” Thus my hands are tied in most cases.
If we need a photo of a specific type of person doing a very specific type of exercise, say, to illustrate some aspect of physical therapy, we usually get the OK. If we need to find pictures of a 60 year-old Asian woman eating a salad, we have to take what we can find, if anything, from stock photos. In the aforementioned scenario, we oftentimes can find a picture of a 60 year-old Asian woman, but it will be oddly cropped or have some kind of blue filter applied or something like that, which renders the photo unusable for our purposes. If the photographers would simply take a clean, full-frame shot of the subject, then we in the illustration and design department would be able to use, crop, or alter the image in many more ways.
I think you will feel better after looking at these “stock photos”
I’m happy to admit to my ignorance if you’re happy to admit to how pissweak your arguement is…
Your assertion that said cropping is the crux of the problem is inherently subjective. After all… one man’s art is another man’s vomit. So what you’re saying is that you’ve paid for a library of photos, which are now proving NOT to be working out for you in the way you’d hoped. Are you now going to also tell us that you WEREN’T allowed to view said photos PRIOR to buying said libraries? Because I’m hearing a classic case of “buyer not aware” here.
I don’t disagree, however, this remains a lame rant. I refuse to believe that your department was NOT allowed to have a free use period on your libraries prior to purchase. I refuse to believe your department wasn’t allowed to peruse the libraries for suitability prior to purchase. You’re slamming the wrong people… you should be slamming the people who signed off on the purchase orders, not the library suppliers. And even then, I refuse to beleve that if you can afford $15,000 on stock photos you can’t buy a Nikon D100 with a bunch of lenses and filters to do the job yourself.
Oh, give me a fucking break. You don’t even understand my “arguement.” You seem to think I’m complaining about wasted money. Read on, let your ignorance be washed away…
If we wanted “art photos” we would have requested them. You’re right, one man’s art is another man’s vomit, which is why they shouldn’t have made the photos into “art” by predesigning them for us. If our art is vomit, then it’s vomit, but by god it’s our vomit and we have a mandate to be consistent in our approach to graphics. The cropping is the crux of the problem, not the cost of the photo library (which seems to be your focus.) At no point have I said that the stock photo library is a waste of money or that I wanted a refund or anything like that.
The photo library was purchased before I was hired at the company five years ago. That is irrelevant, because all of the stock photo companies that I have checked out have the same “predesigned” photos in abundance. It wouldn’t matter which company we bought the photos from. Note that I did not specify which photo stock companies we actually did buy the libraries from.
There are usable photos in the library, of course; otherwise the creative director would not have purchased them. Now, try to follow me here, it’s going to be a little more complicated than the “Classic case of _______” that you like to label things with:
There are maybe 50-60% usable photos on a disk that has subject matter that is relevant to the content of our work and the audience that we publish for and maybe 0- 20% of potentially usable photos on a the remainder of the disks. Of the 300+ disks that we have, I’d estimate that something like 60-70% of the disks have been used at least once. Maybe 5-10% of the disks get used a lot. There are at least 20 disks in the library that have never been used. Why did we purchase them? Two reasons: first, when we bought the photo library we had to anticipate our needs far in advance. Some of those guesses turned out to be correct, some not so much. Second, as far as I know there was a special price being offered if a company purchased the entire collection in a series. Ultimately, we have gotten plenty of use out of the photos and the initial cost of the photo library has never been the issue. Got it? I’ll say it again, since you have a classic case of “lack of reading comprehension.” At no point have I or any of my colleagues complained about having wasted money on the photo library or expressed regret at having bought the CD-ROMs. Hence, the cropping and editing that is “pre-done” by these stock photo companies is the crux of the problem. Instead of 50-60% of the photos being usable on the relevant CD-ROM, we might have 80% or higher usability from those CD-ROMs. It’s frustrating because all they had to do was get the rest of the head in the frame or to leave the filter off the lens or just shoot the photo in color instead of black and white. They limit the usefulness of many of the photos that way.
Gee, maybe that’s why I said it was a “lame rant” in the title. If I thought that we were being seriously ripped off, I wouldn’t have considered it lame. As it is, I’m complaining about an admittedly minor aggravation, and you want to begrudge me even that.
You know, skepticism is healthy. I respect your right to disbelieve whatever you want. In this case, you are disbelieving the straw man argument that you have constructed yourself. However, I did not make the claim that we did not have a chance to peruse the libraries for suitability prior to purchase. Nor did I say anything about any free use period. Because that wasn’t the fucking point. The only people I’m “slamming” are the people who decided that they needed to “predesign” the photos for us.
Remember that reading comprehension thing I mentioned earlier? Re-read my previous posts. We do have a photo department, one with far better equipment than just a Nikon D100. However, hiring a model, scheduling studio time (or scouting a location), setting up the shoot, the shoot itself, the processing of the images, and who knows what else that goes into the process all gets billed to whatever project is being worked on. That adds up quickly, and the editors are unlikley to approve the cost of setting up a photo for what basically amounts to “fluff art” to dress up a sidebar or chart. They will approve photo shoots if we absolutely need a photo of something, but that does not happen often. That leaves us with the stock photo options again, and if the photos are oddly cropped or filtered, we may have to pass up what would have been an ideal image to use something lesser or not use an image at all. Once again, it’s about the unnecessary limitations that the photos have because the the predesign efforts of the stock photo companies.
Yep, I agree. It’s an exceedingly lame rant. Increasingly so. And you’re spending an AWFUL LOT OF TIME trying to defend it’s lameness. Most humourously of all, now that someone on the net agrees with you how minor the aggravation truly is, you’re getting pissed off with them because they’re not providing you with what you REALLY want - namely, sympathy. You just admitted it, there above… in the bolding…
I love this bit I just quoted. You’re confirming what I originally suspected was the case - namely, there are people other than you who are deciding how important your work truly is and you don’t like that. I’ve found over the years that in life, we often argue about things which we THINK are the problem, but they’re just symptoms. The sentence above is your TRUE issue here I’d suggest. You have artistic ambitions which are going unanswered due to either budget constraints, and/or your work isn’t valued highly enough. I’m happy to concede that would make me pissed off too. Rewrite this rant and you’ll have my full support. I don’t trash Pit Threads for sport. I try to aid the writer if I believe my point is valid. The quote above is singularly the most prescient you’ve written thus far. As I said elsewhere recently, I play the ball, not the man. I read what people say… VERY carefully.
Er, Boo Boo Foo, not being able to have full creative license was never the issue in this thread. You’ve just built a fine strawman there.
Sure, it’d be nice to be able to have all resources conceivable at one’s disposal for any project. Forget about poorly croped stocks. Let’s shoot our own. And hey, while we’re at it, this camera I have is so limiting, I need a new one! And new flashes, and reflectors, etc etc etc. Of course, none of this is even hinted at by the OP.
The only reason Cuckoorex even mentioned not being able to take pictures is because you seemed to insist that it was a viable option for him/her without understanding the circumstances.
Just because we can’t have the world doesn’t mean that not having the world is the only real issue.
Eh. That sucks, ** Cuckoorex**. I wonder why the stock photo companies do that though. That is just a random ponder, not a suggestion that the rant is lame. The rant is not lame. That situation would annoy me terribly too. T’ain’t about whether you get to make art or not, it’s about whether the supply of basic materials that you have available meets your immediate need.
It was meant to be cathartic. Isn’t that one of the main purposes of a lot of Pit threads? To blow off some steam? Did it appear to you that I was appealing to a judge or the Better Business Bureau in this thread? Did I start this thread in Great Debates? No, of course not. I know it’s a relatively minor annoyance that is unlikely to change because I don’t like it, and I just wanted to express my frustration. That’s why I took issue with you begrudging me the rant.
I don’t think you read as carefully as you think you do. You already misrepresented my complaint several times and have created at least two straw man arguments as well. You’re still way off in your assessment.
You might want to study a bit more before trying to play armchair psychologist.
I agree 100% with your rant. Ignore the idiot boy.
Boo Boo Foo, out of every thread I’ve ever seen upon the Dope, including the “Burning you Dog” thing, you have just made the single most incoherent, inaccurate, idiot rant. At no point in your entire focused stream of drivel did you at any point, ever, demonstrate that you had comprehended the OP. In fact, not only did you fail to comprehend a simple, basic point, but you then created two completely unrelated points and began bashing the OP on that basis, with one of the least logical arguments I have ever seen. I hope your delusional episodes get better. In the meantime, until you regain the ability to cogitate with your grey matter unhindered by weird aggresssion issues, why don’t you go take a nap.
…
(Burn! Dude, I totally burned you! I burning you post!)
I came here for an arguement.
I’m sorry, this is abuse.
Oh, I see, well, that explains it.
Yeah, sorry. Down the hall, second door on the left.
Didn’t you really get pitted for this kind of thing, Boo Boo Foo? Haven’t learned our lesson yet, have we? Oh, BTW, bondage.
Having had to build websites, this ticks me off also…most stock photo collections are obnoxiously artistically themed, so that even if you are able to find the photo of a pole vaulter in the sunset, it is invariably themed with “wintery blue” filters which aren’t going to work with the “fisheyed lens w/ bright yellow summer lighting” theme the rest of your pics are from.
I want a raw uneditied photo, with maybe a few sample thumbnails of various suggested filters or cropping that can be applied, with the directions in a .doc or read.me file. I can hit the crappy lens flare button myself, put I can’t undo the filters that your image bank “arteests” have applied :mad:
[sub]Is it wrong of me to have laughed out loud here?[/sub]
[sub]cough[/sub] Good rant, Cuckoorex. Keep it up.