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.
Interesting dream
I’m sure at least some of this is resulting from having attended the deviantArt Summit this weekend, but I had an odd dream just before waking this morning.
I was attending a professional photographers event in a theater type of forum. I barely qualified in the dream… something about being published but only once or twice, still trying to make it in the business. Before long, Madonna comes on stage to perform. One of the stipulations of her performance was that there be no flash photography, so all these professional have cheap automatics out, or are suppressing the flash of their big pro cameras. Me, I’m trying to watch the show. One or two people near me screw up and pop off a couple of flashes; Madonna immediately stops the show, no word at all, and walks off stage. The pros around me start giving this one guy a hard time, and he just looks sick, all the while saying “I swear I turned it off”. A couple of people make comments about how to be sure you actually turn off the flash.
I make my way outside to be away from the ruckus. Out in the parking lot I actually see Madonna and some of her people getting loaded onto her tour bus. She’s just standing around talking while the equipment gets loaded. Uncharacteristically bold, I walk up to her casually and say “Sorry about those guys in there.”
She looks at me and with a wry smile says, “Sorry about the swag.” I look down and realize she’s talking about the cheaply designed t-shirt I’m wearing from the event. I chuckle and say “Well, you can’t always win.”
She looks me over for a second, then says “I’ve got another gig in (some other town), would you like to tag along?” I think it over for just half a second. (Think it over? Definitely a dream.)
“I’d love to.” I pause a moment. “Would you mind if I shoot along the way?” She smiles and says, “Sure, knock yourself out.”
“And can I use flash if I have too…?” She hesitates, and I add “…keeping in mind that I hate shooting low-light flash.”
Madonna agrees, and I’m about to walk on the bus when I suddenly realize I’m leaving without my laptop. I run back to get it. For some reason it’s “downloading” pictures from this old manual film camera I have, one where the focus consists of lining up the top and bottom half of the shot in the viewfinder… Fortunately, it’s just finishing up, so I gather up my stuff, and off we go as the dream ends.