Saturday, March 31, 2007

The Blog Name

It seems some people I know are going to be giving me grief about the blog name. For the record I don't actually run around the woods naked (the local ecosystem is already under enough stress.) There are also a lot of thorns, thistles and briars in this area that would make doing that really unpleasant. It seems like something the weird artist type might do to better commune with nature or something but I guess I'm not quite that weird. Though I wonder if it would increase my print sales if I let people think I do...

Friday, March 30, 2007

Traveling

Every time I see my dental hygienist she asks me where I'll be traveling this year for my photography. I had my car in for service the other week and the garage owner asked me where I was going to be traveling. When I tell people what I do they will without exception ask me where I travel to do it. I accept it as an absolute at this point that this question always follows the job description "photographer" and especially "nature photographer." With my dental hygienist I don't feel like explaining it all because of the difficulty talking with her fingers and tools in my mouth. With others I'll often essay an explanation: "I don't travel for my photography. I do it all in this area because the Pennsylvania fields and woodlands are my subject matter." There is usually silence for a moment and I get the sense that they are thinking: "What lame pictures he must take. What is there to photograph around here?" When I first started out doing this a relative that lives near me remarked that "this isn't an an area that's good for photography." Sigh. The notion of photography being about traveling is such an absolute in people's minds. Why do people have such a rigid notion of this? If I said I was a painter would people immediately ask me where I was going to be traveling? How about sculptor? I tell them I don't do National Geographic style wildlife photography- I'm not paparazzi for the eagles and bears. But people never really get it until I show them my work.

My Current Lineup

My next event is Sugarloaf Gaithersburg, Maryland April 13th - 15th. It is their largest and longest running event. Other 2-D artists at Sugarloaf Hartford told me 2-D does very well in Gaithersburg. There'll be twice the number of photographers in Gaithersburg as there was in Hartford so I guess that says something. After that's it's Sugarloaf Timonium, Maryland at the end of April. I don't have any intel on that show yet- no idea what does well and what doesn't.

My first "real" summer arts festival will be the Mayfair Festival of the Arts in Allentown PA over Memorial Day weekend. It's my first fest with the word "arts" in the title as opposed to the word "crafts." Very exciting! People won't be looking at me like I'm an alien when they see my booth is full of 2 dimensional art nor will they be constantly asking "is this your work?" And then there'll be the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts in State College in mid July which will be another real arts fest! Yay! Shows after that I've applied to are still jurying.

April 1 is another major deadline for a handful of important shows so I'm currently sorting through which ones I want to apply to. Some of these are for the summer but most take place in the early fall. The booth fees are nuts. How are people supposed to get started in this business with all the booth fees due before you've had a chance to earn significant income from the events themselves? Somehow it all seems backwards.

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

The Booth

I have only been to art fests in the summer time and that was my frame of reference for putting my booth together. Having done several indoor winter events now I realize that the indoor booth game is much different. In an ideal world it shouldn't be about the booth- just the work. But in reality the booth does matter. The other photographer's booths were all larger than mine, both in floor space and in height. The two artists on either side of me weren't 2D people but they both had higher booths- which made mine look kind of small and lost. I'll be able to correct the booth height situation for the next show- I'm not sure about the floor space. But the cool thing was that for all my booth mistakes I still had some number of people circulate through it and even purchase my work. They seemed to be the kind of people who are experienced attenders of art fests. In other words, the cultured intelligent types. I'll talk more about who my patrons are shaping up to be in another post.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

The Cheaters

I was chatting with an artist near my booth about some of the other photographers there. He said one of the other nature photographers inserted animals into his pictures in Photoshop. I was quite startled by this and didn't quite believe him at first. The cardinal rule of digital photography is that you never, never, ever insert something into a picture that wasn't there to begin with. You can take out lens dust and maybe paint out an out of focus twig or something like that. But you never put anything in. So I took a stroll over to visit this photographer's booth to see what was going on. Sure enough, he had pictures of grizzlies fishing in a river and there was quite a large number of bears in the scene. And some of the bears looked like they didn't quite fit in the picture- he wasn't even that good at hiding it. He also had one of a group of seven or eight bald eagles all sitting on a log in front of lake. I've seen bald eagles in the wild and I've never seen more than one on the same branch, maybe two in the same tree at most. I've never seen any birds of prey ever congregate in one place. It was an awful lot of eagles on that one log. Maybe they were having a prayer meeting. Not to mention his skills as a digital print maker were terrible- the quality of his prints was quite low. And I imagine he used junk paper and all the rest of it. When I got back to my booth the artist that had originally tipped me off said this photographer had quite a following and was doing well with such pictures. I guess if people want to pay him money for that sort of thing it's their business.

This artist then told me about another photographer he knew- one that wasn't in that particular show. This photographer would photograph a tree or bush and then take other pictures he had of birds like cardinals and insert them into the picture. He would sell a certain arrangement of birds in the picture for one year and than the next year he'd change the number and positions of the birds in the picture and then sell it again. And people bought it like crazy. Well, I'll never go there. But if I ever meet this photographer in a show I'll shake his hand and congratulate him on his success. I'm sure he's laughing all the way to the bank.

Hartford CT

I was an exhibitor in the Sugarloaf Hartford CT craft festival last weekend. It was my fourth craft fair and the most sophisticated venue I've been in so far (though all things considered it was still kind of a lousy one.) My sales have doubled for each event I've done over the prior one but I still wasn't able to cover expenses for this one since the booth fee was so much higher. I've kept adding to the amount of work available for sale between the events and improving my booth display which I think has been helping the rising sales. I still have more work to do on it though- I need to get rugs for the floor, some bigger lights, and better backdrop material. My next event will be Sugarloaf Gaithersburg in mid April- their flagship event. There'll be 450 exhibitors- 20 some photographers. I'm exciting about doing a show with so many photographers because I relish having the others to compete against.