While browsing for car ramps I found some of the photos used for some of the items to be laughably bad. Of course, this is nothing new, and I've laughed at bad merchandise images before, but since I was looking at some that were automotive-related I thought we could take a look at some.
Let's take a look at the first offender, displayed immediately below. It's a yellow truck on red ramps. Something I was looking for was height, though it turned out that most were roughly the same height, but a handful could pneumatically lift the wheels a handful of additional inches once on the ramp, as this one could. Cool, right? Look how high that ramp lifted that truck! Well..., keep looking. Does it seem somehow off?
The perspective doesn't line up right on the truck, ramps, or garage. The lighting and shadows don't fit together. While those are bad enough, it's not to scale at all.
It's 9.5 inches high when lowered and just under 15 inches fully raised. In this picture it's lowered, so under 10 inches, but that puts the tires at just over 10 inches tall. Just eyeballing it, this truck can't be more than 2.5 feet tall at the height of the roof. Are these ramps supposed to be for Power Wheels?
Okay, that one wasn't even in the ballpark, but does it share company? Well, of course it does.
This one is for a very similar ramp, but from a different manufacturer and it's black instead of red. The problem is very much the same, though. They didn't bother pasting it onto a picture of a garage, but they put the same lack of thought or effort into putting the vehicle onto the ramp. How do we know it's bad, and not actually this big? Well, once again, it's product dimensions to the rescue.
This ramp has a height range very similar to the red ramp. The vehicle is evidently similarly micro, too, as we can see that the wheel is maybe 10 or 11 inches high and the roof can't be more than 2.5 feet off the ground (when not on these massive ramps, obviously). Once again, we're apparently shopping for equipment with which to work on Power Wheels.
I have one more ramp offender. This one isn't to raise your car to work under it but to get things in and out from a truck bed or trailer. This vendor includes an example of an ATV.
This looks roughly as convincing as the first picture with the yellow truck in the garage. Perspectives don't match for the ATV, ramps, or truck. The ramp shadows run in the wrong direction, heading to the driver's side of the truck rather than reflecting ramps heading more towards the middle of the truck. The truck has a fuzzy shadow but then within that generic shadow are darker shadows for the wheels, but not for the front wheels. The back left wheel shadow is left of the wheel a bit but the right rear wheel's shadow is to the right. There's a bit of glow beneath most of the wheels of the truck between the tires and the ground. The ATV isn't going to make it up that ramp, and it only has shadows for its wheels. I guess it must have underglow or something.
This isn't the seller's only laughable photo of the product, though.
Holy crap, either those ramps are massive or that's another Power Wheels truck! Well, maybe they are massive, right? If only we had a way to know for sure...
Ah. 11 inches across each ramp. The two 11-inch ramps span roughly two thirds of the tailgate, so that gate is roughly 33 inches, or less than 3 feet (36 inches). That truck is altogether maybe a few inches wider than that, so let's say its overall width is exactly 3 feet. How many of us have a pickup truck that's 36 inches wide? I know who does.
I hope nobody buys these things expecting the product they receive to match the sizes they appear in the photos.
One of the first products that really got me mocking their photos was a dino nugget pillow. They were so badly Photoshopped that the kids and I ridiculed them for a while and I even made my own series of laughably badly Shopped dino nugget pillow images, including one fighting Godzilla. While I can't find that original seller and their photos, here's an excellent example of lack of excellence.
These are clearly just lazily slapped onto the photos, but they don't even know what size the pillow is supposed to be. At the top right we see kids opening little boxes, presumably with the dino nugget pillows inside, so they're no wider than a kid's head. At the bottom right we have one next to a sleeping baby, so it's roughly the size of a baby's head. But wait, on the upper left there's one possessed by Satan standing on its own and casting no shadow but also dramatically increasing in size to be longer than a child's torso. Then they take a nap on the couch, where you'll find them of similar dimensions to regular pillows.
Alright, so you've done some work on the car and now you're ready to go up the ladder for some work on the house, but you need a new ladder.
Would anybody wager a guess as to what their job is? He's clearly supervising, no doubt in case she falls from the lofty height of a food and a half. She could possibly bruise an elbow like that. It's a good thing she got that ladder out to spray that spray bottle just a few inches above their heads because how else could they have reached the lofty height of just over six feet to... spray... something.
Fortunately they're sporting their PPE, though they don't agree on what they need for the job..., whatever that might be. She thinks the spray bottle requires a hard hat, gloves, and safety glasses, while he thinks he might instead need hearing protection, I guess in case the pitch of the spray is too high, but clearly it isn't yet because he's stowed them around his neck. He's got the full tool belt complete with drill, plus assorted buckets and a paint roller, in case the spray bottle doesn't get the air wet enough.
I think "just do ladder stuff" was a common direction for ladder photography.
This guy knows you need a hard hat when working on the roof, because you never know when a satellite might fall out of orbit and land on your head. If you're working on top of the roof, clearly you'll want to bring a tool box filled with important roof equipment like pipe wrenches, socket wrenches, pliers, and so forth. Inclined roofs are full of handy places for setting your toolbox down, too. There's no worries about it sliding right off immediately, damaging a gutter on the way down and possibly conking your coworker on the head. Make sure to do that hat-tip to your crew on the way up so they know you're taking the pipe wrenches up there.
Why does the guy on the left even need a ladder? He's a whole foot off the floor and that puts the ceiling light just above eye level for him. This giant could have remained on the floor and just reached up a bit. Credit where due, the guy on the top right actually looks like he's doing a real thing. The guy on the bottom right, on the other hand, looks like his motto is "look busy", even if that means making up jobs like standing on ladders to then brush the gray backdrop below you. He's not painting it, since he has no paint, but rather just fluffing it.
I have no idea. This bikini lady on a ladder makes absolutely no sense on any level. Maybe she went to the photo shoot expecting a sports car ad and instead got a ladder. Your guess is as good as mine.
One last item on the random shopping list, I guess. While we're outside, let's put up some solar lights. They're quick and easy because they don't require any wiring and you can stick them wherever.
And where's the best place to use outdoor solar lights? Well, in a brightly-lighted indoors, of course! Don't ruin the holiday moment by unwrapping gifts by the beautiful Christmas tree. Take them across the room to the outdoor solar light that is somehow glowing indoors even though the room is lighted, which should trigger it to automatically stop illuminating and instead recharge. They're great for Halloween, too, because there's nothing as spooky as solar lights.
We're sorry for wasting your time, but hopefully this was at least mildly entertaining. It started out as auto-related, sort of.
