Project your slides...!
I have a confession to make... I feel quite stupid right now because I *should* have known better. The thing I'm talking about is slides for submissions to competitions, exhibits, galleries etc. Of course we all know (right, RIGHT?) that you cannot just take slides and look at them on a light table, even with a good lupe and then submit them. You HAVE to project them, because that's also how the gallery or the curator will look at it. Of course we all know that. Every book on the business of being an artist will tell you.
But of course when you are just starting out you may not have a projector and you are submitting the stuff "just for fun" anyway, or you are not seriously expecting anything anyway, (fill in your favorite excuse) etc etc. And a slide projector costs some money too (I'm foraging on eBay for a while already and all decent looking ones seem to be $70-$80 plus shipping. Not that much, but still money, especially if you know you'll use it only once or twice a year.
Anyway, finally I thought of just borrowing a projector and to look at my slides. I submitted slides several times now and all got rejected, which is not unusual. It is a frustrating experience till you finally get accepted somewhere. Of course after the 5th or so rejection you wonder what you could do better. From the notifications you know that only a small percentage of submissions gets accepted anyway so getting rejected doesn't mean your stuff is bad. It just means that other stuff was submitted that was either even better or that just fit the show better. But eventually you wonder... are the slides the problem, maybe?
In any case, I finally had a chance to look at my slides. And believe me: they look p-e-r-f-e-c-t on the light table. But on the wall... hmmmm.... o-my-o-my... One of them was slightly out of focus on the edges. Another one seems to have had a hair on the lens when I took it, the next one seemed to have a couple of specks of dirt on it. And so forth. I won't bore you with a whole list but just give you the summary: the slides were mostly OK, but none of them was perfect. And that's just stupid to send a non-perfect slide to a show because these little things distract from your piece. I want the curator to focus on my print and not on the speck of dirt. And most of the slides that get submitted are probably perfect so an imperfect slide will stand out - but for the wrong reason.
So considering that I spend about $30 per submission on average (for submitting 3 slides) + the time and money for packing and mailing + all the work a submission requires it seems that the investment of a $100 slide projector is not such a bad deal if it makes it more likely that my art gets assessed by the curator and not the amount of dirt floating around my appartment when I take the slides. I guess the next time I see a decent looking projector on eBay I will finally click that "bid" button...
But of course when you are just starting out you may not have a projector and you are submitting the stuff "just for fun" anyway, or you are not seriously expecting anything anyway, (fill in your favorite excuse) etc etc. And a slide projector costs some money too (I'm foraging on eBay for a while already and all decent looking ones seem to be $70-$80 plus shipping. Not that much, but still money, especially if you know you'll use it only once or twice a year.
Anyway, finally I thought of just borrowing a projector and to look at my slides. I submitted slides several times now and all got rejected, which is not unusual. It is a frustrating experience till you finally get accepted somewhere. Of course after the 5th or so rejection you wonder what you could do better. From the notifications you know that only a small percentage of submissions gets accepted anyway so getting rejected doesn't mean your stuff is bad. It just means that other stuff was submitted that was either even better or that just fit the show better. But eventually you wonder... are the slides the problem, maybe?
In any case, I finally had a chance to look at my slides. And believe me: they look p-e-r-f-e-c-t on the light table. But on the wall... hmmmm.... o-my-o-my... One of them was slightly out of focus on the edges. Another one seems to have had a hair on the lens when I took it, the next one seemed to have a couple of specks of dirt on it. And so forth. I won't bore you with a whole list but just give you the summary: the slides were mostly OK, but none of them was perfect. And that's just stupid to send a non-perfect slide to a show because these little things distract from your piece. I want the curator to focus on my print and not on the speck of dirt. And most of the slides that get submitted are probably perfect so an imperfect slide will stand out - but for the wrong reason.
So considering that I spend about $30 per submission on average (for submitting 3 slides) + the time and money for packing and mailing + all the work a submission requires it seems that the investment of a $100 slide projector is not such a bad deal if it makes it more likely that my art gets assessed by the curator and not the amount of dirt floating around my appartment when I take the slides. I guess the next time I see a decent looking projector on eBay I will finally click that "bid" button...
posted by Andreas at 5:03 PM
1 Comments:
Well.. blog searches are a relatively new thing. They are tricky do support well. In a normal web search you can assume that the page you are looking for is more or less static, but in a blog the pages might change every day. that's tough for search engines.
I noticed that google recently came out with a beta blog search engine, are you aware of that? And some other blog sites have their special search tools as well, for instance technorati.com. The google blog search is here, by the way:
http://blogsearch.google.com
Maybe this helps? For now I just assume that blog search is flakey. So to answer your question, yes, I find it doesn't work all that well (yet) either :)
Andreas
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