Critically Rejected
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I love this image. I mean, really I do. It has been the background and startup screen for my laptop for several months. It’s the background for my Creative Zen mp3/video player. It’s the front page for my website. It may be a little soft; that is a combination of the tele-macro lens and the awkward hunched position I was hand-holding the camera in to get the Pearce Arrow hood ornament framed in the brilliant red of the sports car next to it.
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I decided to participate in PhotoLucida’s “Critical Mass” portfolio challenge this year (after realizing that I had reacted to late to even have the choice to register for next year’s PhotoLucida event). My portfolio wasn’t chosen but one of my fellow entrants, Liz Kuball, extended an offer to other unsuccessful entrants to have their work featured in her blog.
My image is about halfway down, and even without describing it to you I would almost bet that you could pick it out while skimming through. My portfolio contents were so far removed from the other work that I see here, it makes me feel like a Realist in an Abstract Expressionist world.
I don’t take this as a failing of mine. Nor do I assume at this time that my work did not fit in with the Critical Mass judges preconceptions (I’ll wait until the list of finalists comes out). No, instead I find it encouraging that the clarity of my images stands out in a field of similarity.
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If I ever hear that 72 dpi is “good enough for the web”, I will always remember this image in this forum… I had to reformat the image to 72 dpi as part of the submission requirements. While the other images I submitted looked fine, I noticed there was a fringe of jpeg artifacts in the red background around the body of the archer. Not extreme, and only really noticeable at full zoom, but annoying. Then I uploaded it to the PhotoLucida site, and their auto-generated thumbnail looked like ass – the fringe had become a dancing twinkle of blue lights around the entire picture. I tried several different ways to export and reformat the image, with a couple of programs I had available, but the result was always the same.
I probably should have removed the image from the contest, and found something else to submit. Instead, I chose to make it the last image instead of the default for my portfolio, and hoped that enough other pictures had similar problems that the reviewers might look at the full image more closely. Perhaps it wasn’t the best choice, but I love this image and I really wanted to make a statement with it.