Hello again! Did you miss me?
Did you at least notice I was gone?
Are you there?
[tap tap tap] Is this thing even on?
*Ahem.* Anyway, yes, I’ve been absent for a while. In recent weeks, Carol and I have been working feverishly to prepare for our first appearance at Morro Bay’s “Art in the Park” event, an arts and crafts festival that takes over the city park on Memorial Day, 4th of July, and Labor Day weekends. (I suspect they’re all over the US. There was one in Staunton, VA every year when I lived there.)
Anyway, contrary to my expectations going in, we were actually modestly successful, sales-wise. Not that we’ll be starting a hedge fund anytime soon, but for our first time, it was arguably worth the effort. We’re signed up for the Labor Day edition as well, so we’ll see if we can manage to do even better then. Of my stuff, the work that unquestionably got the most love was my posters, the main difficulty being that I hadn’t made enough of them.
Now that that’s over for the time being, I can hopefully go back for a while to producing new work.
One thing I’ve been doing in the limited time I’ve had recently has been to go back and fuss over some of my “dunnos”. These are photos from my back catalog that are just okay enough for me to have hope that I can make something worthwhile out of them, despite their having (so far) resisted my earnest attempts to get them over the hump. The ones that, when I ask myself “Is there a good photo in here somewhere?”, my eventual response is inevitably
“Dunno…?”
So herewith, I think I’ll share some of these images with you and you can decide what you think.
First, we have the photo at the top of the article. I took this one in Fiji over six years ago, and boy have I ever futzed with it since. Cropping different ways, cranking up (and down) the saturation and light dynamics, playing with the cloud definition, and so on. I like the composition more or less, but there just doesn’t seem to be a lot of there there. No story.
I want to see some kind of subject here, though I’m not sure what it would be. Maybe a flock of birds just taking flight from the palms? Or a flash of lightning striking from the cloud? Otherwise, I can’t decide if I think anybody would ever want this on their wall (or their screen saver.)
Would you?
The next image is another entry from the Fiji stay, and this one feels maybe a bit more promising:
On one hand, there are a lot of nice colors there, some pretty reflections, and so forth. We even have a framing device, with the palm tree at the left. I can imagine taking an idyllic walk along this beach as the light retreats from the sky. Out of all my Fiji pictures, I keep coming back to this one.
But is it enough? Sunset photos have always seemed to me a bit, well, empty unless there’s something describable happening in the frame. If not, it just seems like one of those pictures you see on the wall in airports and cheesy hotels. Does something have to be happening here, like some indigenous fishermen beaching their boat at the end of a long day? Or a kid hunting for sea glass? Who makes the rules for this stuff?
Dunno.
Anyway. Last up in the “They Might Be Giants” photo parade is this one, from right here (more or less) in Morro Bay:
There are things I definitely like about this photo. I love the definition and warm underlying color of the rock, and the frothy splash of the wave. I like the overall composition, with the strong diagonal running from lower right to upper left. I like the bright palette, the freshness and the immediacy. I even like the 1:1 aspect ratio, recalling the legendary Hasselblad 6×6 medium format. The world needs more square photos.
But I have issues. The splash of the wave is kind of puny against the scale of the rock. The composition, while fairly satisfying, is anything but subtle (“brutalist” is a word that comes to mind). The birds in the distance are probably cormorants, but they basically look like poppy seeds at this remove. And all that bright white cladding on the rock face? Yeah, that’s generations of bird shit. (Oh honey, look at this awesome picture! Have you ever seen such a soulful visualization of bird puckey?)
So here we are. I like all these photos, I enjoy looking at them. But what do I do with them? Are they worth the cost of printing? Should I put them up on my own walls? (Fat chance there — I don’t even have room for the sale-worthy stuff.) Should I try to market them to a crappy hotel chain? Or just relegate them forever to the non-life of digital storage?
I dunno.
Ronald Crittenden 