Family Life

Nope. Didn’t do a shred of work today. I took photos instead. But first some background.

We take photos of everything we make. We have archives going back years and years, back to the very early days of consumer digital photography where a camera with 2 megapixels was an advanced model. Back then photos were either taken with ambient light, indoors, hand-held, and blurry as anything, or were taken with the puny built-in flash at a distance (too dark) or up close (white-out glare). Now we have something much more up-to-date, probably in the 5-7 megapixel range. It shoots movies. It has a close-up macro function. High ISO (i.e. good low-light sensitivity). So how do our current photos turn out? Yep. You guessed it. Either with no flash, hand-held and blurry, or with the built-in flash and dark / glare effect. Oh how technology has changed in the intervening years. Oh how our photos haven’t.

As you may imagine, the very existence of such photos causes anguish to my photographer’s heart. The fact that we print them on the covers of our manuals, show them off to our customers, and eagerly email them to potential customers just confirms the total lack of artistic feeling in our collective engineering soul. We shouldn’t have this problem. A lot of what we make is visually quite beautiful, to an engineer, that is. Intricate. Polished. Solid. Exuding fine craftsmanship.

The problem is that we’re in business to make machines, not photos of machines. Historically there has been a lot of resistance toward taking the time and effort to get decent photos. But it gets a little embarrassing when amateur snapshots are all we have to promote the company in print and online.

Management has begun to recognize this, and so ever so slowly attitudes are starting to change.

Today I got the chance to spend a full day just taking photos. I had (mostly) all the time I needed to set up backdrop, lighting, tripod, and camera. I took conventional shots for manuals and advertising, and angled, twisty, abstract shots for marketing. Almost 300 photos total. I was running up and down stepladders to set lights, or adjust my subject, or peer through the viewfinder. Hot work, under the lights. But I had a blast.

I suspect that’s been part of the reason for the opposition to proper photo shoots: they knew I’d have too much fun. Fun Is Not Allowed. That’s why they call it Work. Because it’s not Fun. But today I had fun at work.

Next week I start a couple of months of paperwork. Manuals. Government R&D reports. No fun at all. Dead boring, in fact. Will my one day of fun tide me over the dead zone? I rather fear that today’s high will be a dim memory before the week’s out. Still. Today I had fun at work.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 11:42 pm. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated if this is your first time, otherwise they will appear immediately. I reserve the right to delete inappropriate comments.