I was asked recently to sit in as a juror on a regional art fair. I won't say which one, but it's 250+ artists so it's not small beer. The thing I found very interesting is that the work submitted for the most part, by far, was above average quality and I recognized several AFI folk.
Now here's the rub; the jurors were able to see past most of the poorly done images that were projected. Most of the time. The things that have been preached about on here time and again just weren't done by all. The ones that had their act together stood out from the rest by having well done images that showed details and form, graduated backgrounds, and above all, were able to show their quality of workmanship clearly.
There were a fair number of slightly out of focus shots, bad angles where a painting with a frame looked like a rhombus instead of a rectangle, bad lighting that obliterated some of the details of a piece, or just poor exposure.
Some of the booth shots were virtually useless where someone took a shot of the booth during a show and the back flap was in direct sunlight. That made a great silhouette with all the artwork solid black looking like a cityscape with the sun on the far side of the city.
The scores were clustered closely together for the most part with less than a 20% spread. Guess which ones got the benefit of the doubt?
You spend time, effort, and creativity in creating your artwork. The job doesn't finish when you sign it, bag it, or put in on the shelf in your booth. Documenting what you did and how you present it demands just as much creativity and effort if you expect to make it into the big shows. If you don't, someone else will. Professionalism does shine through. </rant>
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I'm always trying to get a better and improved booth shot. I feel that my past booths shots were so-so but have never had that special something that that would make me smile and say "Oh Yeah"...!
I just finished completely redesigning my booth and display setup and look forward to setting it up within the next week when I have some decent weather outside..
Robert...I will follow your method and leave it set up for as long as needed so I can get that "WoW" shot I feel excited about. In the past I have set up the tent in the morning and took photos throughout the day and would go to the computer and see the results and then go back and try again. I would just do this for that day and would take the tend and display down in the late afternoon. Heck, I leave my tent and displays set up at shows for days...so I should at least do the same in my back yard.
I leave my photo cube set up permanently in my office and am able to photograph and re-photograph my artwork to try for the best photos.
There is so much to learn and so much I scratch my head about as I try to improve...but I keep trying cause I know it is so important
Did you apply for the gig, get referred, just asked by a committee who knows you, or other scenario?
The other day, a person asked AFIers in which category she should apply, and got some good responses. One of those responses answered her question, and then said "You need better jury images, too." They were just O.K.
Really, every time I hastily photograph something, no matter how hard I try, images come out lesser quality than if I had spent another hour doing the job right.
I'm always trying to make mine better. I've had my best ever jury images and booth shot for the last three years and am about to update. So stars, please stay aligned for me! WOOHOO!
Another show that I applied to a couple of years ago has open judging so I sat in the back to observe. That one is one of the upper tier shows. The work submitted was all over the map with really spectacular work and incredibly amateurish work. It was like a bimodal distribution with one bell curve for the good stuff and a lower and smaller bell curve for the newbies. That one was easier for the judges to weed out, the one I helped judge was clustered much closer together and the accepted artists aren't obvious until the number crunching is done.
Someone on here mentioned a while back that jury and booth shots are a continually moving target. My current booth shot took almost three days to do with constantly going back and rehanging work along with adjusting lighting. I finally had three Novatron flash heads mounted in the top of my booth strapped to the center support and bouncing off the canopy like a giant umbrella.
That was me. When I clicked on one of the images, it came up 100% and was blurry.
Artists need to resize their images to 500 or 600 pixels long dimension and embed them in the post instead of as links.
Larry Berman
http://BermanGraphics.com
412-401-8100
Larry Berman