I’ve mentioned previously that I need to produce 100 new exhibition quality images over the next 24 months, so I’ve been making some progress producing new images, albeit in a rather haphazard rather than planned manner.Now I only do model pictures, so all the exhibitions with sections such as wildlife, landscape and photojournalism are not much use to me, so I usually end up just entering the colour and monochrome sections. However I spotted the Han Pijesak salon and it had mono, colour, woman and portrait sections, which is ideal for my style of photography. You can enter 4 images per section and it’s always tempting to mix in new images with some existing images which have been successful to try to ensure that you at least get some images accepted, or maybe pick up an award, but I resisted the temptation and entered 16 images which had not been entered anywhere before.
Now there’s no solid definition for the Portrait section, and I don’t generally do portraits, but I decided that anything from a three-quarter length to a headshot would constitute a portrait, and these are the images I came up with:
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| Gaze – Fredau |
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| Evening Light – Romahni Rose |
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| Poppies – Rebecca Tun |
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| The Green Door – Ivory Flame |
For the Woman section I decided on three-quarter or full length shots of the model, and with the model being a reasonable size in the frame.
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| Beauty At The Window – Ivory Flame |
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| Blonde Beauty – Romahni Rose |
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| Shadow – Madame Bink |
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| The End Of The Storm – Ivory Flame |
Now with the Monochrome section you don’t want judges thinking that the images should have maybe been entered into the Woman or Portrait sections, so where there are these type of sections I generally go for images where the model is smaller in the frame, and maybe the image is more about shape. Often the face is not showing as well.
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| Arch Maiden – Ivory Flame |
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| Concrete Maiden – Keira Grant |
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| Into The Sky – Chrissie Red |
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| Wall Maiden – Ivory Flame |
And for Colour it’s generally the same criteria I use for mono images but with colour images obviously.
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| Beauty In The Window – Katy |
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| Beach Walk – Romahni Rose |
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| Nature’s Beauty – Kayleigh Lush |
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| The Red Sofa – Kayleigh Lush |
So that’s the vagaries of the various sections, the next fun part is titles. Each image has to have a unique title, one that you haven’t used for a previous image in any other exhibition. Some people are rather unimaginative in their titles eg Fredau 1, Frefau 2…..Fredau 37. Titles are often read out, and I try to keep my titles simple as the judges may not know much English. It is quite a difficult task thinking up a new title for every new image. Also I prefer people to read what they want into an image, rather than leading them with a very descriptive title. You’ll notice I use the word Beauty, Maiden and other such words quite a lot. In this case two of the images have titles that differ only by one small word – Beauty In The Window and Beauty At The Window.
When the results came in I was extremely pleased that all 16 images were accepted, which is a really super start towards the 100 required. As an added bonus I won an award in each section. Gaze with Fredau won a gold medal in the Portrait section, Beauty In The Window a gold medal in the colour section, Arch Maiden a diploma in the mono section and Beauty At The Window a diploma in the colour section. So a pretty perfect result all round, and it’s also give me the motivation to find lots more new images for my next entry.
Thanks to the models involved in helping create these beautiful images with me. Also thanks to a number of people who made comments and suggestions when I posted some of these images on a forum, it’s always good to get other people’s thoughts before you put images in front of a judge, as other people can spot things that are staring you in the eye buy you just don’t see!
2 Comments
With this post I now realize why people stare at artworks for so long. They stay there until they “get it”. They look and think until they understand what the artist was doing. I think I “get” many of these now.
Wall Maiden, though skillfully photographed, confounds me.
Poppies, which I think I love the most, makes me concerned that I’m being seduced by the red color of the flowers and models sultry eyes rather than loving the photo’s artistry.
Thank you for your well considered comment as always Mr Pope. I leave everybody to ‘get’ what they want to from my images, without leading them too much, but as my style is to create very simple images I think they have the quick visual impact required for these type of competitions.
Wall Maiden – I just loved the large rectangle to bound the image, and then Holly is mimicing the ivy to the right of her, or something like that ;)