Christmas photos at the mall

[Ray Marrero]

I was at a Mall today in PA. They have a giant Christmas tree where you pay to have your picture taken with Santa Claus. There were a couple of kids working the light, camera and cash register. I happen to witness this, tell me what you think.

Two teenagers came and, I don't know what they said but, they managed to pose with Santa while one of the workers snap a picture of them with their camera phone. Then they walk away with a picture in their phone AND without paying anything.

Doesn't the worker understand that they are running a business? He just gave away product for free. I don't know why this bothers me.

[MattL]

One of my friends is about to start doing this at her local mall. She's hasseling me now saying shes the only professional photographer around here lol.

I guess they are just doing it for their hourly rate, with little regard to how much they make the business owner.

If they were on commision, then it'd be a different storey.

I recently find myself disgusted when reading my national newspaper, at all the low-resolution photos they publish. This morning was a photo of Tony Blair, that looked about as good as my cellphone would take - the byline was Reuters.

The moral of this storey? Camera phones are scum!

[Pyromaniac]

MattL
The quality of a photo in the newspaper is probably partly because of the actually paper it's printed on and partly because it's cheaper to print the photo at a lower quality. In a newspaper the photo's are only there to help tell the story not to be hung in art galleries, and I sure if you look the story up online they probably have at least a slightly better version of the shoot.
Ray
As far as the mall Santa’s I'm not really sure if the actually have "professional" photographers do that, or if they just have some mall employee that know how to work a camera do it. Most of the time it’s just a way to get people to come and spend money at the mall. So the person working the camera probably doesn't really care too much about it, it’s just something they're being paid to do.

[MattL]

I dont mean bad quality as in bad compositon, lighting etc. im talking about 14k gifs that have been blown up to half page size. Jpeg artifacting clearly visible, so much so that its sometimes hard to tell who the person is.

Im not after glossey magazines here, but at least print a 3mp image, not a camera phone image. Its Tony Blair! Reuters would have loads of shots of him.

[SWPhotoImaging]

Tony who?


j/k :lol:

[Nidz]

Camera phones suck anyway so what's the point. You wouldn't realy print out a shot taken on a camera phone.