In August I shot engagement photos for a couple of friends of mine.
He wanted colour. I knew from past experience that she's difficult
to shoot in colour and convinced him to let me mix in a roll of BW.
In September he said he was going to send me the money, and that he
wanted the negs scanned to CD. I took the film to the labs, after
hunting around for somplace that could scan the BW.
In October, after much prodding from her, he finally sent me a check.
I picked up the proofs and CDs, copied the images to my file server,
cropped the ones that really needed cropping, and uploaded the ones
I was willing to show off to a temporary directory on a web server.
She hated the photos, as she hates most photos of herself, and wished
the whole matter would vanish.
In November, he told me to pick the few I thought were best, try to
remove his 5-o'clock shadow if possible, and upload hi-res versions
so he could pick one to have printed. He wanted them in his hands
before leaving NY to fly to Ontario (this afternoon) to spend Christmas
with her and her family. She mentioned considering herself unattractive
in her online journal and linked to one of the photos (oddly enough, one
of the ones she looks best in).
In December I realized I was running out of time and lacked the skill
to do much more than I'd already done on the computer, so I uploaded
hi-res copies of what I'd managed to clean up, told him which was my
own first choice, and waited for him to pick on for me to print. I
submitted three BW and two colour. Meanwhile she moaned loudly in
her online journal about how terrible it was that photos of her were
going to exist and be given to her family.
Getting a message back from him and not seeing any indication of
which image he wanted, I told the lab to print my favourite. Since
I'd taken so long on the digital side of things, I had to pay the
lab's rush-order surcharge to get the prints to FedEx in time to
get them to him before he flies to ON. (Erase a little bit of my
projected profit...) After dropping off the order at the lab, I
hear from her that she doesn't like how she looks in that shot, but
thank goodness I didn't pick this other one that she hates even more.
Over the weekend I called her to explain to her that she's a lot
more attractive than she thinks, and to talk about whether or not
it's apropriate for him to give her parents a copy of the picture,
and so on.
Monday I picked up a stack of 8x10, 4x5, and wallet prints and run
off to FedEx. Yesterday I got anguished email from him saying that
I'd sent the wrong photo -- that he'd told me to use a different one ...
... the one she *REALLY* hates.
(BTW, I now get the impression that he rather dislikes black and
white photography.)
He wants me to fix this "ASAP". I've already paid the rush surcharge
once, as well as FedEx shipping. I've spent many more hours working
on this than I'd budgeted when we talked about money. He's going to
be in ON until Boxing Day, after which they'll both be in NY visiting
his family for a while. And we're now definitely into my lab's
Christmas crunch, when everything takes longer than usual because
so much work lands on them all at once. And he hasn't reacted to my
pointing out that the photo he wants printed is the one she hates
the most.
After looking several times for the missing Friday message in which he
told me which photo to use -- the instruction I never saw -- I finally
found it. He'd quoted my previous message, with the standard '>' at
the start of the quoted lines, and added his reply onto it. Seeing a
paragraph that I'd written, my eye skipped to the end of the quoted
section and picked up at the text in "his voice". Well it turns out
that I'd written the _start_ of the quoted paragraph, and the last
few lines were by him -- and that included the bit about which frame
to print, all quoted with '>' at the start of each line. He's not a
net.newbie. He's been online since well before it became eternally
September on the net. He knows better. From my mother I would expect
such a stunt -- I already have to hunt through her replies to find
what she wrote (seems like it's in a different place each time) --
but this is a competent net.old.fart.
So now I'm looking at printing a fresh batch of 8x10s and trying to
figure out whether to mail them to NY or ON, hoping that he doesn't
want me to make this another rush order (which would come close to
wiping out what's left of my profit), and worried about how she's
going to feel about his picking her nightmare to give to both sets
of parents, maybe use for the newspaper announcements, and probably
insist on displaying in their home after they're married.
The painful part is that, as I mentioned way back at the beginning
of this message, they're both friends of mine. I want to close my
eyes and not watch how this plays out.
I guess it's time to crawl into bed and see whether any of the shows
I taped while I was at rehearsal are interesting enough to take my
mind off this situation so I can sleep.
Yeah, yeah, I know the moral of this story. *sigh*
-- Glenn
