The students at McKinney High School have good heads on their shoulders. Except, in many of the photos of this year’s yearbook, those heads are on different students’ shoulders. Or students’ clothes changed colors. Or limbs went missing. Or, as in one case, the clothes went missing (a girl’s torso was nude-colored but blurred). The school had hired a national photography company to handle the portraits. According to the DMN story:
Officials from Lifetouch National School Studios Inc., the Minnesota-based photography company, said someone at the company made the alterations in an attempt to comply with the school’s photo guidelines.
The school wanted student head sizes approximately the same and students’ eyes at the same level in the photos.
“Unfortunately, we misinterpreted what those guidelines were,” said Sara Thurin Rollin, a spokeswoman for Lifetouch.
“Misinterpreted the guidelines” is my new favorite Get Out of Jail card. Wick: “What were you thinking with such an asinine, ill-conceived idea? I asked for trenchant analysis of convention center hotels and all you gave me were fart jokes and pictures of cats.” Me: “Sorry, sir. I misinterpreted the guidelines of the assignment.”
7 comments
Um, what happened when the digital photo files were sent to the yearbook staff to lay out the book? Do they not do that on their own? I was the yearbook editor at a tiny high school in Everman almost 10 years ago and even we used PageMaker and would lay out the entire book ourselves. Can you really blame the photography company alone? Surely someone saw that yearbook before those pictures were actually printed.
I wish we had this technology when I was in high school (1990-1992). Then I wouldn’t have to look at the horror of my mullet combined with my King’s X shirt.
Tim,
that sounds like your best story ever, please post link.
Ahem.
Yeah, I’m with Missy. I saw every cotton-picking photo before it made the book, and the galley proofs – twice – before the book came back. We had about 1,200 in the 10-12 school.
How do you not notice that?
I thought the whole point of the suburbs was that the students already had approximately the same sized heads and eyes at the same level. Or has Lifetouch been in charge of the community marketing pieces too?
As the adviser of the yearbook in question, let me give a little background.
1. The proofs we received from Lifetouch were not the ones on the disk.
2. We had no way of knowing what students were wearing.
3. The standards we asked for simply means that we would like the camera the same distance away from each student so that in rows, one is not zoomed out the next zoomed in. It’s for the historical record.
4. And the way we had to replace the photos was tedious and time consuming.
5. Lifetouch had to retake all the pictures for our school for the previous year because they dipped the film in the wrong chemicals and destroyed the images. So make this two years in a row.