For a month or so now I've been preparing for my selling season.
The first project was to make a whole bunch of 4x6 files for prints
from Wal*Mart's Alladin machine for my blank notecards. This involved
a couple of weeks of scanning, cleaning up, IPTC info inputting,
saving, resizing, resaving, jpegging, resaving and CD burning.
The second project was to create two posters, one specifically for
the gift shop of a relatively new local customer, the second was for
the "fine art" audience but primarily here on the upper Cape. One
poster used a panoramic assembled from 8 slides shot from a boat on a
cold but not windless day in December. The other used a panoramic
shot with a tripod in an onshore gale at sunset, assembled from four
slides.
The third project was to prepare a large scan for the cover of a
local non-profit's annual report.
The fourth project was to completely reveiw my trannies and prepare a
submission to a new local magazine which preferred pages of slides
over a CD. I needed to look through 6 years of shooting, pull every
possible slide, send them all out for duping and, when they return,
caption (ugh) all 200 of them, put them in slide pages and prepare a
binder with terms and conditions, bio, cv etc.
The final project was to do my taxes (ugh again), a project which is
usually quite simple but is complicated this year by having to sell a
tiny gift of stock from my life insurance company in order to
purchase a less old car than the 1989 Toyota wagon I bought in 1994.
During all of this process my government as been ramping up its
belligerence and prancing about showing off its absolute lack of
concern for the opinion of some large number of its citizens and
international colleagues. I was raised to abjure both belligerence
and arrogance so I have been increasingly distressed by this
posturing and hubris.
I have now come pretty close to the 15 of April, and I am happy to
report that the 4x6s are finished, the two posters are in the bidding
stage (mostly for the rolling and tubing), the non-profit cover file
had to be created from the neg by the printer and the organization is
ignoring my contract, the slides are out being duped in Denver and
the taxes are done.
And my government has moved from belligerence and posturing to daily
friendly fire casualties and the wholesale killing of civilians and
military opponents.
Belligerence always gives rise to strong feelings. Fear,
self-righteousness, pride and self-absorption rise out of the depths
to which we continue to try to consign them in order to behave
peacefully with each other. They're very basic emotions -
understandable but not laudable. Carried to extremes, they propel
those who they hold in thrall to rage, abuse, murder, terror and
arrogance. My government and a large part of my country's populace
has succumbed, once again, to their attractions. It's so much easier
to succumb than to deal with the problems without the adrenaline - so
hard to wait, so hard to negotiate because you might not get
everything you think you must have. Sooo hard to recognize that
something you did scares the shit out of other people, and you're
partly responsible for what happened to give rise to your fear,
self-righteousness, pride and self-absorption.
But the seven deadly sins are actually just that, and human beings do
need to keep trying to not succumb to their charms. Their
attractions are very powerful, and very destructive.
One nice thing about my set of projects is that I've gotten a lot of
new material into my JPEGs folder, so I have been able to submit to
the RIT gallery on nearly a weekly basis. And being as how I'm a
growing professional photographer looking for input about how my work
is perceived by the rest of the world, I have, weekly, some hopes for
some of that from our gallery.
Part of getting feedback from the gallery, it seems to me, is to
supply feedback. So I have also decided to try to review every time
I submit. Seems only fair - you hope for opinions about what you put
out there, probably every one else does too so why not put your own
opinions out in return for theirs?
So I'd like to ask my colleagues on this list to resist the charms of
these powerful emotions and turn your attentions to the weekly
gallery. The emotional energy you would put into a review could do
all the submitters a lot of good and help you to deal with your
strong feelings at the same time.
thank you
