Poor Quality Poster-size Prints in Public Places

[Michael Heald]

Hello! I've been noticing large poster-size prints in various places, such as in a hotel's elevator advertising thier restaurant, or vacation spots advertised in the airport luggage pick-up area. I've been surprised at the poor quality of the prints. Usually, they seem enlargements from a 35mm or equivalent digital camera, with no thought to grain or perspective.
I scratch my head and think how little work it would have taken for the photographers to take the shots with a large format camera, how much better the product wuld have been.
Then I wonder about the management of these organizations and why they accepted such work.
Is large format becoming uncommon enough that the customer doesn't realize the advantage of large format for such large prints?

Best regards,

Michael A. Heald

[Alan Davenport]

They probably got the photos from Fl**r, or some other web site, for free.

[Bob Salomon]

Budgets

[Dave Parker]

If done properly, 35mm can provide the type of quality you need for this type of advertising, which is part of what I have done for the last 15 years, one of the biggest problems you see now a days, is they think a cheap digital camera will cover the quality they need, which you have found, they don't, sometimes I work in Digital, with only a 6.3 megapixel DSLR and have just done an ad banner for a company where the image was blown up to 4 foot by 4 foot and it came out quite nice. One of the problems when looking at large posters in an elevator, you are to close, at every step of the way, images are optimized for a certain viewing distance...

No Large format is not becoming uncommon, but is uncommon in many advertising circles now a days, but there are still many of us, that use LF gear, depending on the job at hand, and the amount of enlargement required for the job.

However I do agree with Bob, much of the crap we see now a days, is due to budgets, as well as misconceptions of quality.

Dave

[Clay Turtle]

However I do agree with Bob, much of the crap we see now a days, is due to budgets, as well as misconceptions of quality.
Dave Before coming over to LF, I used to submit photos at usefilm.com. Basically I used 35mm for post throwing in a few 4x5's. One such shot I cropped
into similar square format & submitted, a review came back about the light colored glow at the top of a flower. My reply was simple, thee 11x14 (full frame) showed that the glow was fibers from the stamen of the flower. Interpolation may work well with portraits (people) as flat even lighting to reduce texture is flattering but product photo require sidelighting to give texture. You can easily reduce print size => quality but the reverse operation doesn't.

[Brian Ellis]

I spent half a day one time educating salesmen for a real estate company in how to use a camera and make presentable (at best) photographs so that the salemen could make the photographs used to advertise the houses. Why? So that they could save the peanuts they were paying somebody to drive up to a house, open the car window, point the camera and click the shutter. I mention this just to give you an idea of how budgets affect this kind of thing, as others have mentioned. This was a huge real estate company, the amount saved had to be next to nothing and the photographs the salemen made were going to be worse than what they were already getting. But they didn't care, all they wanted was to save the minimal amount they were paying someone to make photographs.

This was all pre-digital and before the web became a major way to sell houses. But take a look at almost any local realtor's web site. You'll usually see some sort of a photographic tour of the homes listed. The photographs are almost uniformly terrible. You'd think that as important as the web has become for selling real estate, it would be worth their while to hire a decent photographer to make these photographs. They don't have to be Architectural Digest quality, just not have the rooms slanted, correct exposure, etc. But they apparently don't think decent photographs are important enough to justify paying someone to make them.

[Louie Powell]

It's called "the lowest common denominator", and it's getting lower every day.

[Fred Leif]

Yup ....

if you own a camera, you're a photographer.

If you own a piano, you own a piano.

Fred

[BarryS]

That kind of work is completely driven by price and speed. Most hotels are notorious for paying rockbottom rates to get photographs of their rooms, restaurants and public spaces. There are a lot of utilitarian uses of photography where art and skill aren't required.

[Dave Parker]

I spent half a day one time educating salesmen for a real estate company in how to use a camera and make presentable (at best) photographs so that the salemen could make the photographs used to advertise the houses. Why? So that they could save the peanuts they were paying somebody to drive up to a house, open the car window, point the camera and click the shutter. I mention this just to give you an idea of how budgets affect this kind of thing, as others have mentioned. This was a huge real estate company, the amount saved had to be next to nothing and the photographs the salemen made were going to be worse than what they were already getting. But they didn't care, all they wanted was to save the minimal amount they were paying someone to make photographs.

This was all pre-digital and before the web became a major way to sell houses. But take a look at almost any local realtor's web site. You'll usually see some sort of a photographic tour of the homes listed. The photographs are almost uniformly terrible. You'd think that as important as the web has become for selling real estate, it would be worth their while to hire a decent photographer to make these photographs. They don't have to be Architectural Digest quality, just not have the rooms slanted, correct exposure, etc. But they apparently don't think decent photographs are important enough to justify paying someone to make them.

Brian,

You have hit the nail squarely on the head...My wife owns a web design company and one of her largest client base is realtor's, she does several websites for many local agents as well as companies and the picture they send her are some of the worst I have ever seen, and we are talking 500K houses and up, you would be amazed at the crap they send her for 1-2 million dollar trophy homes. She has mentioned on several occasions that both her and I are photographers and we would be happy to take the pictures for them for actually what I consider a give away price, the answer is always, nope, don't have the money! and they always say, I have a small digital camera that I use!! Of course, most of the time, they don't even know how to get the pictures off the camera, let alone, make them look there best!

I don't know what the commission is on a million dollar home, but seems to me, it would be enough to spend a couple of bucks on a photographer!

:rolleyes:

Dave

[QT Luong]

Unless you commission a shot (quite expensive if travel is involved), unless you go to specialist agencies, what you get as stock is 35mm, even if you go to the leading agencies.

[Jim Galli]

The "dumbing down" of America at it's best. A whole generation has no clue of the difference so why pay for it. Anyone with a D200 is a pro. The folks who look at that crap go to the restaurant advertised, pay $88 for s**t, then go home for an evening of Survival Island or whatever the latest reality show is that people with no life shoot into. America is about an inch deep and those elevator ads are just our speed.

[domenico Foschi]

That kind of work is completely driven by price and speed. Most hotels are notorious for paying rockbottom rates to get photographs of their rooms, restaurants and public spaces. There are a lot of utilitarian uses of photography where art and skill aren't required.

SHow me an image of a room, bar or restaurant shot by both a professional and the owner's brother in law and see which one makes the subject more inviting .

[roteague]

The "dumbing down" of America at it's best. A whole generation has no clue of the difference so why pay for it. Anyone with a D200 is a pro. The folks who look at that crap go to the restaurant advertised, pay $88 for s**t, then go home for an evening of Survival Island or whatever the latest reality show is that people with no life shoot into. America is about an inch deep and those elevator ads are just our speed.

That is worth repeating Jim.

[Ron McElroy]

This is yet another aspect of the business world where someone with the purse decides a job is good enough. I've witnessed this throughout my career in commerical printing. When desktop computers first were coming out in the late '80s/early 90s we would get pasteup art with rastered type printed out on laser printers by clients. I would question the quality and be told by the client that they had done it themselves, its good enought. These are the same clients that would of ripped me a new one if I had given them that quality before they had purchased their desktop publishing systems.

The inexpensive digital cameras and inkjet prints continues the just good enought trend that I've experienced.