As I have already mentioned, recently there has been a noticeable improvement in the quality of images coming out of the National Party social media machine. Such as:
It seems though, that occasionally things don’t go according to plan. The PM recently presented a series of awards to Young Scholars at Parliament. As is to be expected, there were a number of images that came out of it:
Grin and grip photos, and photos of people mingling are not the easiest to get good photos off. Add in the horrible mixed fluro/incandescent/flash lighting, which gives you the two different white balances, and you end up finding it really hard to get good images. However, the photographer who took these has done a pretty good job.
The quality of the grin and grip photos is not what I want to blog about, that was just background. The photo directly above, of the PM presenting the cup to the student has been used as part of a graphic that has gone out on the PMs Facebook account:
If you have great, high quality photos to use in your graphics, why would you then go and destroy them? Whatever they have done to the image has resulted in a loss of detail in the shadows, the skin tones have gone to pot as well. If a party is going to put all of the effort, that they appear to be putting in, into creating great images, then they need to make sure that they use that image quality and don’t allow your graphics people to ruin the image.
Questions should be being asked as to how no one in the chain of command, who are required to check and sign off on graphics before they go out, noticed the image quality? Did no one think that something needed to change before this graphic went out, or was it more a case of no one checking the quality of the product being produced? Or did someone in the chain of command feel it was a good idea to go for an “Instagram” style look? No mater which of these options it is, it is not a good place for their social media process to be in.
