The art of commerce, part 1

I make postcards.

It’s a pain in the butt, making all those 4 by 6 prints and stamping the back, but they sell for a dollar each at the local gift shop. It doesn’t pay my mortgage, but I know for certain that whatever effort I put into making postcards will be rewarded.

I also sell small, inexpensive prints with pre-cut mats in clear plastic wrappings. And I did a batch of mousepads with my photos, which sold steadily. Recently I set up a greeting cards web site.

I know that some artists would say this makes me a sell-out, or a “commercial” artist, or that I’m cheapening my work by mass-producing it.

Well, fellow artists, someday I hope that I will be as well-known as Ansel Adams and sell for $5,000 each the 30 by 40 canvas prints that really show my photographs to their best advantage.

Or maybe I’ll win the lottery.

Or I’ll decide to become dependent on my husband for financial support in addition to his emotional support.

But, until that day, I shall sell postcards and matted prints and mousepads and anything else that has a decent return on my investment in time and energy.

Here’s the breakdown: I make low-priced reproductions of photos that I know will sell – the landscapes, birds and flowers that are recognizable to my audience – and I know that this “cheap art” will reach many hundreds of consumers.  The profit margin works out to around $12 to $30 an hour.

I also make expensive, limited edition prints of photos that, according to contest and exhibit judges, meet the standards of fine art, and these are a puzzle to many and seen by few. Collectors do buy them, but the volume right now is so small that the profit margin works out to maybe 50 cents an hour.

Sometimes there’s crossover and one of my allegedly fine-art photographs appeals to a broad audience – then I can sell it in many forms. And sometimes people who keep coming back to look at my “accessible” work start to understand what I am doing in the abstracts or darker pieces.

Best of all worlds, I figure.

Let me also say this in defense of the cheaper forms of art:

The postcards, mousepads and small prints are a great marketing tool. Every one of them carries my name and my web site URL. People in my community and visitors here know my name and my photographs, and they visit my web site and recognize my style. They keep the postcards or they send them to friends far away, which expands my name recognition at no cost to me.

Second, sometimes postcards that get taped to the refrigerator, mousepads that rest under our hands, and small prints that are thumb-tacked onto the wall have just as much impact as a big expensive canvas. They are part of our everyday life and we love them too, because they are infused with meaning.

It isn’t the medium of the art – it’s the message.

Not all of the people who buy my postcards and mousepads are fine-art collectors, but all of them appreciate a beautiful image of North Georgia. Owning even an inexpensive reproduction is a way for them to remember the peace and enjoyment they feel when contemplating nature. Why is evocation of these  feelings “not artistic”?

[For more on this subject, see the column at Empty Easel by Denise Ivey Telep.]

Final question: If I don’t do “commercial” work, then I need to do something else to pay the bills. Given my work experience, that would be consulting on overseas media development projects, editing a newspaper, writing grant proposals, or running workshops.

Would that be somehow more respectable for me as an artist – to stay engaged with my former career, even when it drains my creative energy?

Or would it be better for me to be a waitress, so that I could keep my brain free for Art, uncontaminated by serving a larger audience?

For now, I choose postcards.

Guess What #2

I think maybe last week’s “Guess What” was too easy. It was indeed the Empire State Building – shot from the top of a 15-story building a few blocks away, with a digital zoom equivalent of about 1000mm. Congrats to George, Chris and Bob for spotting it.

Not giving any hints for this week’s photo. That would spoil it. If you already know from seeing it on my web site, please restrain yourself and let others guess

I will say, though, that this shot was taken with a Canon Powershot S3, NOT with a DSLR – and could not have been shot with any DSLR I know of.

[Simultaneous post on my photos-only blog]

Of contests, books and legitimacy

Got a letter today that at first made me very happy: My photograph “Rain, From Below” was chosen as a finalist from among 3,000 entries in the 28th Annual Spring Photography Contest of Photographer’s Forum magazine, co-sponsored by Canon.

Rain, From Below - Bali 2007

Then I realized that there must be at least 104 finalists (and I assume, double that number) because next month they will announce the 100 Honorable Mentions and the first through fourth place winners. But still, even if there are 300 finalists, I’m in the top 10 percent. And hey, it was an international competition.

As a finalist, I’ll see my name and photo in their hardcover Best of Photography Annual 2008. That’s nice too – but, I have to pay $55 for a copy of it.

Hmmm…. I could buy some of that really nice Epson fine arts paper for $55. Or a tank of gas to go shooting in southern Georgia. Couldn’t they have given the finalists a free book, or maybe a discount?

But, well, what do you want for a $4-per-photo entry fee?

This letter starts me down the usual no-win debate inside my head about contests in general. I’ve always hated them, never thought they were worth much. I saw great photos and feature stories that didn’t win contests and mediocre photos and stories that did.

I remember all the contests I sat through as a young journalist with my photographer friends. We’d go down to Columbus for the Ohio News Photographer Association judging sessions, which were open, and watch the judges rip through those photos. There were hundreds of photos, and so each image got perhaps a 2-second viewing before being rejected or taken to the next level of judging. It was a good lesson in just how to compose and light a photo that has impact.

In fact I learned a lot about photography from those contests, but moreso from hanging out with some very fine photojournalists. (Ed, Gus, Marcy, Denny, Fred, ….. you know who you are)

One year in particular I remember because a young woman won the portfolio competition for Photographer of the Year. She was still in college, I think, but she’d done an internship in California and came back with some photos that were pretty exotic by Ohio standards – bullfights and such.

The subject matter was dramatic, but her technical skills left much to be desired. Meanwhile, several of the photographers who had never traveled outside of our poor and dying rustbelt corner of the state had very fine portfolios.

That year it was the glamor of California that swayed the judges, and we felt the “real” photographers had been robbed.

To this day, the photographers I respect the most are those who find a great photo no matter how mundane the assignment. Any asshole can take an interesting photo at an exotic location. It takes a really good shooter to pull a great photo from an ordinary situation.

Here are some examples:

2007 Winners ONPA

Ed Suba Jr.’s sports photos

[Watch this space for more examples as soon as I can coax them out of my friends}

Guess what #1

Trust me – seeing this in color would not help you to identify it.

If you have seen this structure, the color version might actually confuse you.

It is located in the northern half of the United States.

Comment with your guess. In a week (August 1) I’ll publish the answer.

["Guess What #1" is simultaneously published at my photos-only blog.]

The “Decisive Moment” and the Luna Moth

The phrase “The Decisive Moment,” an interpretation of the title of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s book “Images à la sauvette,” is frequently quoted in modern photojournalism. For the French painter, photography’s appeal was in its ability to capture the essential, fleeting fragments of life.

“Photography is not like painting,” Cartier-Bresson said in 1957. “… Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative.”

As a young journalist I was steeped in Cartier-Bresson, and compelled by events such as the Kent State shootings and the Iran hostage crisis to understand and interpret America’s role in the world. That led me to travel extensively in developing countries, and to train local journalists in those countries to see and record their own decisive moments.

In middle age I’ve turned to nature photography. The slow unfolding of form – in a leaf, a flower, or a moth – now intrigues me as much as pulsations of action. When I study any scene, I let my eye wander to find the exact point where a brief physical manifestation intersects with the invisible, eternal universe.

For me, this is the “decisive moment” of natural architecture.

Blood Lotus

My photo, “Orange Needles,” appears in the summer issue of the online literary journal Blood Lotus:

I am pleased that it introduces the Creative Nonfiction section of the journal, which is how I’d categorize my photography, if I had to put it in a literature classification.

The first piece in the section is about how the value of objects changes over time – another theme that I keep returning to.

Anyhow, check it out – there’s some good reading in there, and the cover piece is very nice too.

Tilt. Shift?

So awhile back, faking tilt-shift photography was all the rage on flickr and similar places. The idea is to make a normal landscape photo look like it’s a miniature via Photoshop gradient mask and lens blur. Like this:

It’s clever and cutesy cool and many people have spent hours playing with the effect.

[MORE EXAMPLES from Bryson City on my photoblog.]

Yes, even me.

Maybe it’s the desire to play God, make everything seem small but strikingly clear.

Or maybe it’s a nice way to make up for the fact that you can’t afford a tilt-shift lens.

Or that you didn’t position yourself strategically to get the effect you wanted.

Or… that you had too much light to limit the depth of field.

Or, didn’t know how to use the equipment you have to create a very narrow strip that’s in focus.

[Straight out of the camera. Shot with a Canon Powershot S3, supermacro, 1/50th at f5]

[Straight out of the camera. Shot with a Pentax K10D, 50mm lens reverse-mounted, at f1.7]

Roadside stand

Seems like you always see the prettiest flowers when you’re driving along at top speed, late for a meeting. The trick is to remember to go back to that place right away and shoot it.

First it was the fire pink. I didn’t know that’s what it was – I just saw the intense red flowers along the side of a gravel road as we flew by. As usual we were running late for our Master Naturalist class, so we didn’t stop. Then I saw them again along the side of a road near our house. That time I was with a friend, so I didn’t want to ask her to pull over.

But I went back there to shoot it. That’s what got me started on shooting weeds.

Same thing with trumpet creeper, day lilies, woodland phlox…

Mickey, our instructor for Master Naturalist class, says that a weed is just a wildflower that’s out of place. I reckon he’s right.

There’s a lot of development in North Georgia, bad economy or no, and a lot of woods and fields getting ripped up for houses.

We don’t even know what’s being lost.

[All photos in this entry were shot in public right-of-way along open roads in North Georgia.]

Street Legal

There’s a new online literary journal, CeLLA’s Round Trip, which happens to have published one of my photos from Dubai. My photo’s called “Street Legal” and it’s on page 34… but page through because there’s plenty of eye candy. (I haven’t read it yet so can’t vouch for the writing…)

And notice the nice, virtual format of issuu.com. It’s a free online magazine publishing service, so if you’ve ever wanted to be a zine publisher, here’s your chance.

In honor of this publication, I put up a special gallery at Baraka Images. This gallery will come down eventually, so check it out now!

Meanwhile, here’s another sample.

(In case you can’t read the sign, it says in Arabic and English, “Celebrate the joy of togetherness – Celebrate shopping!”)

Togetherness, indeed.

I do miss the irony that is Dubai.

Night vision

Last night I was on my deck with a big portable halogen lantern, trying a new technique called light painting, which involves “spraying” beams of light across a scene at night during a long exposure.

The results were not exciting. I stood there, flicking my hands at all the bugs that were drawn to the lantern, debated whether to put on some bug spray.

Then I looked down. A big beetle was lying on its back, apparently dead. I crouched over it and looked at those fine joints in its legs, the gloss of its shell body. Started shooting.

Two and a half hours later, I had some photos that I could love. The artificial lighting really helped – not for what I thought, though.

These bug photos will not sell very well as decor, but they are about illuminating the life of the night.

And the beetle, it turns out, was alive. When I tried to pick him up, he wiggled back to his feet and stalked off into the night.