Monday, December 7, 2009

Fuzzy Kitten Warning

The latest head honco at work (who is in charge of daily operations and yet lives many states away and visits this humble city a handful of days per month) decided that our offices are ugly and that we need artwork on the walls. No big surprise there. We received a budget of $3,000 and a couple of employees were approached about using their photographs. These guys are semi-pro photographers and have very nice cameras that take very nice pictures. Plus there's the matter of having the artful eye in creating a pleasing composition for these very nice pictures. The company is going to pay to have the prints professionally framed but when the employees asked how much they would get paid for the use of their photographs, well, shouldn't that all be gratis?

So now we're having a company-wide photo contest! Go out and take pictures of the city (or children and/or kittens... children and/or kittens always score big in photo contests... pretty much anything that looks like it belongs on a 99 cent Walgreen calendar) and submit them. Many will enter, many will win and you'll get to see your artwork all big and blown up in 16X20s on the walls.

Of course these will probably be shot at 8 or 10 megapixels with compact pocket cameras so once they get blown up to poster size there will be noticable grain. Oh, and it's currently winter so every exterior picture will be washed out, colorless and grey unless they are taken during the 18.2 minutes of sunshine during the average north-eastern Indiana January.

I personally think we should also have a picture framing and matte cutting contest. Cut that matte nice and square and you'll get the satisfaction of seeing your matte surrounding an off-center fuzzy photograph of a co-workers childing holding a fuzzy kitten!

No comments: