Quick update

I just got back from a 4 day trip to Chicago and around the Indiana/Illinois/Wisconsin sides of Lake Michigan. I got a bunch more photos of lighthouses. I haven't had much time to go through them yet. I'm still getting ready for my next show. I'm trying to make some changes to my gridwall setup. Thats partially complete. I need to make a few more pieces and then do a test assembly. I also found a lightly used 5x10 trailer to buy. I'll be picking it up on Wednesday. I'll be posting more details on lots of topics soon.
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Booth photos from first show

As a followup to yesterday's post about my first show, I thought I'd post some photos of my booth setup from this weekend:







As a means of comparison, here is my booth slide from several months ago:



Similar, but the differences are:
1) Lots more framed photos...the entire left wall used to be empty. Now everything is filled
2) I have an actual bin for my photos, they aren't just sitting in cardboard boxes
3) More matted prints...lots more, and I now have 3 different sizes.
4) Got rid of that ugly chair and got 2 decent looking foldup chairs
5) I have a tablecloth on my table
6) The leftmost gridwall has been fixed...I chopped off the bottom section of the grid (which was a bunch of tied together segments) and added the fold out shelf in it's place.
7) Concrete filled PVC weights in the corners.
...click here to read more!

My first show is done!!!!

I did it! I can now say I'm a professional!

I had my first show this weekend: Livonia Michigan Art from the Heart. I was pretty happy with how things turned out, attendance seemed pretty good, and the show appeared well run. My goal for the first show was to break even on the jury/booth fee ($270). Counting just sales to strangers, I sold about 2.5x my booth fee, plus another $300 to friends/family (and no, they didn't get a discount). I was more than happy with my results. I heard some artists vowing to never return while others proclaimed it their best show ever. I'll be going back next year.

I sold a variety of photos, but I had one that was a runaway success. It sold 8 copies (five 8x10, three 11x14), was commented on by about 90% of my booth visitors, and was pointed out by countless people who walked by my booth without ever walking in. It was a 12x16 matted, framed print of this squirrel:


Leading Up to the Show

In the last 3 weeks before the show, it was apparent I needed to size up my inventory. I took most of those 30 or so photos and printed up 2 copies each of 5x7 (8x10 matted), 7x10 (11x14 matted), and 11x15 (16x20 matted). The first copy was double matted in a color combination that was picked by myself and my wife to accent the photograph. The second copy was single matted in plain white, as I've heard a number of reports here that white sells better than colors. I should add that all of my framed pieces were done with the colored mats.

A few weeks before, I decided I really did need a good cart to haul these in. Several months back, someone had suggested Rock N Roller carts, and they seemed very interesting to me. I debated over and over whether to save money with a smaller R8 or R10, but eventually I decided the extra $60 or $80 was worth it, so I went for an R12. I also knew I needed some bags for sold items. I bought some 18"x28" clear bags from veripack. I bought 100 packs of clear sleeves from Frame Destination in each of the 3 sizes. I built a nice wooden display box (2'x4') to hold all 3 sizes of prints.

In the last couple days, I decided I needed some business cards. Since I needed an address, I went and picked up a PO box for $25/6 months. For the business cards, I bought the avery clean edge cards ($16 or $18 for 200). Those things are brilliantly designed. Very easy to split apart and very professional looking. I decided to make a variety of cards. Each card had a photo on it. I set up a template in MS Publisher, made 25 copies of the template, and in each one I put a different photo (and put the "title" in tiny print just under it). I put a copy of the corresponding business card in the sleeve with each photo. I did a similar thing with MS publisher for the certificates...making 1 template then replicating it for each photo. The certificates were a complicated affair...doing a "Mail Merge" against a MS Access database of inventory (I'll write more about that in the coming week or 2).

The Day Before

I had already printed all my prints and cut all my mats, but I hadn't yet signed, assembled, and bagged most of them. The day before I spent the morning designing, printing and signing those certificates of authenticity. That took entirely too long(but now that it's done, I'm more than happy with the results). I finished up at about 3PM, got to work signing prints (I put the print #, photo title, date photographed, and signature on the back), and almost had that finished by 5PM. But now I had to stop.

Setup was allowed the evening before from 5-9PM, and I figured that was a better option than trying to rush in the morning, so I was now focusing on that. I had to carry everything upstairs (just the tent, gridwalls, cart, and ladder...everything else went the next morning), and load up the car. It took both my Blazer and the bed of my wife's pickup to get everything there.

My wife helped me setup the tent and grid walls. I wanted to do a practice run with her, but time didn't permit. However, she figured it out on the spot and managed just fine. Took us about 1.5-2 hours to get that all unloaded, carted to our spot, and setup. I was so glad I bought the R12 cart...it hauled like a charm, rolling over grass like nothing.

After that, I was exhausted, but had to go back home and get right to work on the prints. I was up until 1:30 AM putting them all together. Then I still had to come up with pricing and print up signs. I decided on the following price:

8x10 mat: 1st=$20, 2nd=$15, 3rd+=$10
11x14 mat: 1st=$40, 2nd=$30, 3rd+=$20
16x20 mat: 1st=$60, 2nd=$40, 3rd+=$25

For framed photos, I did
18x24 = $130
16x20 = $100
12x16 = $75
and then I had some other various sized frames.

I printed up the signs, started gathering supplies to bring, did my normal bedtime preparations, and got to bed about 2AM. For the next 30 minutes, I kept thinking of additional things I wanted to bring, so I'd get out of bed and make a note. By the time I actually fell asleep, it was about 2:30AM

Day 1

Stupid chirping birds woke me up at 5AM, and I couldn't go back to sleep, so with only 2.5 hours of sleep, I got up at 5:30 and started off the day with a good solid whack of my head into a door frame (left a nice mark in the center of my forehead). I made up some name/price tags for my framed work, packed up, carted the rest of my stuff upstairs, loaded the vehicles, took a shower, and left for the show at about 7AM. Got there, carted everything to the booth (again, the R12 cart performed excellently), hung all my framed work, setup my table and print bin, got out my sales kit (receipts, knucklebuster, cell phone for authorizations, etc). My wife showed up at 9, and I finished up setup about 9:30 (show starts at 10)

They always say your first sale will be your most memorable. Not only was it the most memorable, but it had the most memorable story. 9:45 (before the show officially opens) this lady walks in, spots this photo


and walks straight up to it without even looking at the rest of my booth. She tells my she loves pink, usually wears pink, she lives on flamingo street, and she just painted her bathroom hot pink and was looking for a photograph to match. She looks at the 3 different sizes and picks out the 11x14. SOLD!

I had 7 more sales that day (2 to friends and family).

I screwed up on one thing. I left my wife in charge while I took a break to walk around the show (no that wasn't the mistake...keep reading). I told her to call me if anyone had questions or for a sale. Someone came in with questions about my framed collage of 7 Michigan lighthouses. My wife called me, but my phone ringer was on quiet and I didn't hear or feel it ring. He said he would come back. After quite a while, he never showed up. My wife wanted to buy something from another booth but had trouble deciding. I told her I would take a look with her. I left my mother in law watching the booth, and we left for 2 minutes. In that time, he came back with his wife, they discussed it, she told him "whatever you want", and they left without saying a word. They never did come back. I was kicking myself until someone else bought it 30 minutes later.

My business cards with the pictures seemed to work. Whenever someone clearly liked a photo but couldn't be persuaded to buy it, before they left I gave them a card with that photo. One girl was clearly in LOVE with the squirrel. I gave her the card and she left. My mother in law saw her walking in the next row or booths, clutching the card in both hands, holding it up to her face, staring at it longingly. About an hour later, she came back and bought it. Another lady came back to buy the squirrel the next day.

Other notable point of the day...one of the readers of this blog stopped by my booth (if you are reading this...say hi) to tell me she was interested in attending fairs and had read my blog for ideas. Sometimes I almost wonder if I'm writing to myself here, so it's always great to be reminded that people DO read what I write.

After the show, we stopped at the store to pick up a couple of frames (to replace the collage I sold), I went home and printed up 16 more photos (including 8 of the squirrel). I cut up the matboards, and let it all sit overnight to dry.

Day 2

I actually got 7 hours sleep. I woke up, signed and framed my prints, bagged them up, made a few more business cards, got back to the show, and opened up. Sunday morning was slow....didn't get a sale until almost noon. Then it started picking up. I made 11 sales that day (2 to friends/family). My last sale of the day was a nice one too. I had some pictures of Washington state. Some lady came in, spotted my photo of Diablo Lake, and proceeded to tell me she was from Seattle (grew up there for about 20 years) and was upset that she didn't take any photos while she was there, so she had been looking for some nice photos of the area. After looking at my framed photos, she didn't seem quite convinced. Then I remembered I had one more photo unframed in each size. Using my best salesman technique (which is generally pretty poor) I proceeded to show her only the 16x20 version. She liked it, pulled out a crumpled wad of bills, and just barely had enough. SOLD!!!

My stupid mistake of the day....Some couple liked one of my 18x24 framed photos, said it would be great for their living room, but that it wasn't big enough. Stupid me let them get away, and only minutes later I thought "IDIOT!!!!! You should have told them you can have one made for them and have it ready by the next show"

After the show, my wife and mother in law helped tear down, load up 3 vehicles and cart it back home.

Thoughts and Conclusions


1) Most importantly, I need to get this down to a 1 vehicle job. Best bet is probably to go with a 4x8 trailer. I think that's where all my money for this show is going.

2) I need to rearrange my booth. I don't like where we are sitting. We were sitting in front of the booth for a few hours until one of the other artists spotted us, came over, pointed out where everyone else sits, and suggested we need to move to the back to invite people into the booth more. We rearranged and got us sitting in back of the booth.

I went over to thank him, and he started showing me all the other ways I could setup my booth better. I absolutely love the spirit of the people who do these shows. I did my best to return the favor by helping one neighbor open her booth when she showed up late 30 minutes after open, and I helped another neighbor with info on printing and my booth setup (she normally sells ceramics, but is getting ready for a photography show this summer and doesn't have the display yet)

3)My colored mats far outsold my white mats. I generally only sold white after the colored one was gone. I did have a few people prefer the white mats, and I had one person who upgraded from an 8x10 to an 11x14 because the 8x10 colored had already sold.

4)I need to make my booth quicker to setup. Connecting the panels together each show is too much of a pain. I need to find a better way to do the detachable legs. The most irritating part is that, the whole reason I went with the current scheme of detachable legs and bolt together segments (rather than Larry's zip-tie together grids) was because I couldn't fit the whole panel + legs into my car. If I go with a 4x8 trailer, that whole obstacle has been removed, and everything was made more complicated for no good reason.

5)EARLY PREPARATION IS KEY. I can't stress this enough. By the end of the first day, I went home and thought "I can't possibly see myself doing this any more than a couple times a year". I was happy with my sales but discouraged with the effort involved. After a good night rest, I was feeling much better, and at the end of day 2 I was looking forward to my next show. Being tired and rushed made the whole thing seem 10 times worse than it was.

6)MINIMIZING EFFORT IS ALSO KEY. Its worthwhile to invest money into well designed equipment. I was dreading hauling everything back and forth, but the Rock N Roller R12 made it a piece of cake. It was more effort getting everything there than it was hauling it. I'm excited about the idea of a cargo trailer (so I don't have to load/unload before/after each show, or fight packing it in the vehicle). I'm considering putting the profits from upcoming shows towards a better canopy, and then maybe towards better (professional) display walls. At this point, I'm not the slightest bit interested in recovering my last 2 years of expenses. I want to put everything towards making future shows easier...which will hopefully make me more inclined to apply to more shows.

7)Things I liked about the Livonia show and how it was run (not sure how much of it is run of the mill for shows):

• They did a LOT of advertising in the week before the show. I saw TV ads running during the evening news. Lots of other artists were commenting about how many ads they saw/heard for the show


• Day before setup...I think it's a great idea to be able to setup the night before, then rest overnight before beginning the show the next day (but morning-of setup was still an option if you wanted)


• Likewise, to make setup and teardown convenient, they had the police block off 1 lane of traffic (2 lanes for teardown) so that you could park right in front of the area to load up.


• They had food for artists each morning, and a very nice picnic for us Saturday night.


• They had workers come around to offer to watch your booth while you took a break.


• They had a package pickup area. When you make a sale, you give the customer 1 half of the ticket, attach the other half to the bag, place a flag out in front of your booth, and workers would pickup the package and hold it for the customer at the pickup area. Although I didn't end up having to use it, I thought it was a great idea none the less.


• They had a nice variety of artists/vendors...not too many of any one medium.

8) I was very pleased with the number of positive comments I received. Lots of comments on how my photos were by far the nicest/cleanest looking of the photographers at the show.

9) Surely, theres a bunch of other things I want to add but can't think of.

I'm looking forward to my next show (less than 2 weeks away)
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A few days from my first show

I haven't posted anything recently. I've been VERY busy the last few weeks, getting prints ready, buying supplies and equipment, building stuff for my booth, working on business cards, etc. I have lots of things I'd like to post here, but haven't had the time. Hopeful after this weekend I'll have a chance. A few of the things I'd like to cover:

-Constructing PVC/cement corner weights
-Modifying one of my display panels to create a shelf.
-Constructed my print display box
-Creating my business cards
-My Rock N Roller cart.
-Suppliers I used to buy things inexpensively.

Wish me luck...
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Show rejections and "no refund after acceptance" policies

This week, I received rejections for 2 of the shows I applied to (Orchard Lake and Northville). Unfortunately, the rejection letter gives you no clue why you were rejected. If I had to guess, I'd suppose it was for 1 of 2 reasons.

One likely possibility is that they were not impressed with my booth slides. Being my first year, and having to get the booth slides ready months ago, I had to hurry up and take the photos with whatever setup I had available at that time. The display definitely looked a bit unprofessional.

The other likely possibility is that they simply didn't like my choice of slides of my work. The slides I sent in were of some of my best (in my option) shots, but were in the ordinary photographic landscape style. They weren't in the abstract style or done with artistic effects (watercolor or sketched). Since these shows seemed to be more of an upper notch fine art style of show, I now wonder if sending in my more artsy shots (even though those aren't in the style I focus on) would have had more success.

Of course, there are other possibilities. Perhaps a landscape photographer is not the type of artist they envision in their shows. Or perhaps they really liked my work and thought there was nothing technically or artistically wrong, but that they had enough people who were just a notch better than me.

Whatever the reason, I now have 2 more weekends without shows. I was hoping to get in a half dozen shows this year, but now I only have 2 confirmed shows with 1 more application out waiting for a response. Now I have to find some additional shows to apply for. I guess that, for the 2 shows that are an hour or so away and thus I was unsure about applying for, I guess I should go ahead and apply for them. An hour drive is better than no show.

One of the things that really irks me about many shows is their "no refund after acceptance" policy. In an ideal world, you could pay your jury fee, get accepted, and then have the choice of paying your booth fee or turning down the show and letting someone on the wait list take your spot. However, many of the shows want you to send your booth fee with your application and state there are no refund after you are accepted.

This burned me on the Orchard Lake show. I had 2 possible shows to apply to for that weekend. Both shows had due dates in the same week. The other show had the no refund policy, and its decision date was after the Orchard Lake refund deadline. I picked the show that I thought would be the more rewarding one to participate in, and now that I've been rejected, I'm not in either show. I have a feeling I would have stood a better chance of getting into the other show.

I'd like to say "oh well, lesson learned", but I'm not really sure what I learned. The reason for my rejection is completely ambiguous, and there's really no better way I could have worked the application/refund issue.
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Preparing for upcoming shows

It's getting to be a lot of last minute work getting everything ready for the upcoming shows in June (3 and 5 weeks away). At the moment, I'm working on building up inventory. I have all of the pictures I want picked out and prepared (24 of them), and each one has been framed up once, and a few also have prints matted up in other sizes. Now my goal is to get every single photograph matted up in 3 different sizes(8x10, 11x14, and 16x20), 2 of each size. In the process of doing so, I just purchased 20 more sheets of matboard, a case (25 sheets) of foam backing board, and 300 clear plastic sleeves (100 in each size). I'm going through the time consuming task of cutting up all the mats. I also purchased a roll of bubble wrap and made sleeves out of it to hold and protect my framed prints.

Still on my todo list (which grows as fast as it shrinks):
1)Order plastic bags for the customer to carry their purchased prints
2)Get some clamps to help secure the top even better in case it gets rainy/windy
3)Test out my credit card processing (I have the equipment, but I'm still waiting for the service contract to arrive)
4)Setup some sort of shelf on the grid wall, so I can use it as a writing surface when I write up the sales slips.
5)Continue working on the inventory.
6)Do a trial run with my wife for setting up the whole display.
7)Create a list of all materials to bring to the show.
8)Buy or build my display bins for the prints
9)Get some sort of cart to help carry things back and forth from the car to the booth
10)Make certificates of authenticity for the prints
11)Make business cards.
12)Remember what else I forgot to put on my todo list
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Official website and 2nd art show acceptance

Last week I received my 2nd art show acceptance letter (chronologically, this show will be my first). It's for the Livonia Art from the Heart show on June 10-11th. I've sent out 3 more applications in the last couple weeks, but I'm still waiting to hear back. I've got 3 more shows I'm considering applying to this year, but trying to decide if they are worthwhile and if I want to drive that far (they are about 1 hour away). The application deadlines aren't for a few months, so I think I'll see how my first couple shows turn out.

The other news is that I've launched my official website for Ronald Frazier Photography.

http://www.ronfphoto.com

There's not a lot to talk about with the content of the website, so I'll take a deviation from photography to show off a bit of my inner geek and talk about the technology and design processes behind the construction of the website.

Goals

Of course, the primary goal of the website is to look good....good enough to help sell prints (especially once I get the ability for customers to purchase prints via the website). But almost as important is that the website is fast. Too many websites use a lot of graphics to make the site pretty, and it takes forever to even be able to see any content. Finally, the 3rd major goal was that the site render well in all the major browsers, even without plugins or javascript. This means not using Flash (which I personally dislike anyway).

Optimizing Graphics

The first step is to make sure all the images are as small as possible. For this, Photoshop's "Save for Web..." feature is absolutely critical. First, because it strips out all of the extra (non-visible) metadata that usually gets stored in the image. Second, because it allows you to very easily and quickly see what the results will be if you save the image with varying levels of compression or even using a different file format. It shows you both what the graphic will look like as well as an exact file size.

In addition to simply adjusting the file format, I also investigated where I could shrink the file size by splitting an image into 2 parts. I did this first with my logo. The top section of the logo is narrower than the bottom, so I trimmed off a bit of blank space on the right. I also did the same with my slides (film strip) at the top . I trimmed off the top and bottom black & white edges, put those in a separate png file (and used the same file for both the top and bottom edges). Having the edges separate allowed me to use a fairly aggressive jpeg compression on the slides (where the quality degradation's not as noticeable) without making the edges look bad.

These 2 techniques allowed me to shrink the images in my navigation header significantly. What started out as nearly 100KB worth of images now sits at under 30K. In addition, most of that space is accounted for in the 18.5KB slides. The second largest image is 3.5K. Also, since most web browsers will load at least 2 files at once, although the slides are a bit slow for a dialup user, the rest of the images (logo top and bottom, and the navigational links) will load right along side the slides, and they'll do so quickly. So even while the slides aren't fully loaded, The rest of the navigation will be in just a second or two.

Finally, even though the slide strip is 18KB, it is saved as a progressive jpeg, which means that the image loads incrementally. After the first 2.3KB loads (2 seconds or less), users on a slow connection will see a very low resolution version of the slide strip (on browsers that support incremental display). After 8KB it will be blocky, but the images will be recognizable. After the full 18KB loads they see the full resolution image. While this doesn't make the page load any faster, it makes it SEEM to load faster, which is what's REALLY important. I used this same trick on the other large images in the content area of my home page.

The above information is little more than simple graphical optimizations that should be well within the reach of any photographer who knows his/her way around a graphics program in even the slightest way. Next up is an optimization that's a little bit more advanced, but worth considering by anyone who is reasonably knowledgeable in web design.

Using CSS

My entire web site is designed around CSS. CSS is a technology well beyond the scope of this blog, but there should be plenty of CSS tutorials out there to get you started.

In a nutshell, CSS lets you simplify your HTML by moving all of the formatting information out into an external CSS file. It also makes it easy to set appearance attributes (default font, sizes, and color) for your entire website.

In the past, formatting on websites was done by putting everything in tables and then adjusting table dimensions and using spacer images to make everything line up. This has 2 disadvantages. 1) It clutters up your web page code with tons of extra tags, and every tag adds to the size of the file, which makes your page load slower. 2) Tables are very inflexible. Some layouts are extremely difficult (if not impossible) to do, and once you get it working how you want, it's even harder to make adjustments to make it appear a little different (moving one small image can wreck havoc on the entire page).

Using CSS allows you to reduce and simplify all of this. Your file sizes will generally be smaller (thus faster to load) and your HTML will be cleaner and easier to modify.

Combining CSS and Javascript

Now we are starting to get more complicated. Although not super advanced, we are now in the realm where you should have a little bit of software programming or web scripting experience.

Combining CSS with javascript also allows you to do some cool things. Take a look at my "SHOWS" page and notice how the show information is collapsible. This makes the page look more organized. When the user first loads the page, they don't have to be bothered with all the extra details about each show (time, address, notes, etc). Instead, they see a simple and concise listing of the shows, which they can then expand for more details if they are interested. This is done by using javascript to dynamically change the CSS class of the tags in the page.

Of course, its important to make sure your website still works properly if the user has javascript turned off in their web browser. In the case of the "SHOWS" page, the user will see the full cluttered list of information. It may not be ideal, but it's about the best you can do.

Also, I should point out an optimization I use. Almost all of my javascript is in an external javascript file. The advantage of this is that once a visitor loads the file once, they don't have to wait for the javascript to load again each time they visit a new page.

Stepping up to AJAX

Now we are getting pretty serious. This isn't for those without a decent amount of software programming experience. However, even if you don't have what it takes, please read on to see what I'm talking about so that you know what is possible. It might make you want to hire someone to do it for you, or even be the motivation to teach yourself how to program.

AJAX is a combination of Javascript, CSS, XML, and server-side scripting (such as PHP, which is what I use). AJAX allows you to load data into your webpage dynamically. The advantage of this is that you can update small segments of your page WITHOUT having to reload the entire page.

Take a look at my gallery. Of course, make sure you don't have javascript disabled. When you first enter it, what you see is the left menu and a bunch of empty space. In that empty space are 3 more empty boxes (div tags), waiting to accept content. When you click on a link from the left, the second box gets loaded with some new data from the web server...in this case, it contains 4 thumbnails, and optionally some up and down scroll arrows. The interesting thing you will notice is that, other than that box with the thumbnails, the rest of the page does NOT reload. Now, click on one of the thumbnails. When you do, once again, the page does NOT reload, but now you get a larger image in box 3, and a bunch of information (title, location, etc) in box 4. Now, in the thumbnail box, click the down arrow and you should see up to 4 more thumbnails get dynamically loaded and scroll into position while the old ones scroll out of view.

So how does this help? As stated earlier, only certain sections of the page need to be updated. This means the user doesn't see the rest of the page flicker as it reloads. In addition, the amount of data downloaded from the web server is considerably smaller. As an example, for the 4 steps above (load the gallery, select lighthouse, click on the first lighthouse, then click the down arrow), without the use of AJAX the pages are 4.3KB, 5.4KB, 6.0KB, and 5.2KB in size, respectively. That's a total of 20.9KB of data to be downloaded (not counting images). On the other hand, using AJAX, the downloads are 4.3KB, 2.5KB, 0.8KB, and 1.3KB in size respectively, for a total of 8.9KB. It's very easy to see how much faster this could be for a user on a dialup connection.

A side benefit of using AJAX to load the galleries is that I can do interesting transition, like the way the thumbnails scroll in, rather than appearing in place immediately.

Of course, once again, the site needs to be fully functional if javascript is disabled. I accomplished this by making each clickable link (the left menu items, the thumbnails, and the scroll arrows) so that it reloads the entire page with the correct contents in each block. However, when javascript is enabled, the javascript overrides the link's url and initiates the AJAX action instead.

Conclusion

A lot of the motivation for doing these optimizations comes from wanting to make the page load quickly for dialup users. However, some of you may be thinking "who cares about dialup...most of my users have broadband". Well, despite the fact that you are probably wrong, even if we assume that's a correct statement, these optimization will also benefit a user with a high speed connection. During peak times of day, even fast connections can get slow, and using AJAX to avoid reload flicker make your website more visually enjoyable to everyone at any speed.

Well, I hope this gave you some useful ideas for how your web page can be optimized for better performance. There should be at least something in here for everyone, regardless of experience level.
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Spring at the Henry Ford Estate

I've been so busy with getting ready for art shows and other stuff that I really haven't had much opportunity to go out on any photography outings since I went to the arboretum earlier this year. However, on Saturday, I made a trip up to the Henry Ford Estate to take a walk through the trails around the lake.

The scilia (little purple flowers) have been coming up and have spread like wildfire around the lake. It made for quite a nice view. However, it also reminded me how much you have to capture a moment when you can. I had been looking at the scilia all week thinking "wow that's such a beautiful sight". However, by the time the weekend came around and I got out to take pictures on Saturday, it seems as if the flowers aren't as full as they were during the week. I think the green leaves on the flowers have grown enough to overpower the purple. Looking at them today from a distance (as I do all week),it seems the once vibrant purple clusters are nearly invisible in the midst of the grass. I can only imagine what sort of photos I might have taken had I gone 3 or 4 days earlier, when the purple was seemingly at it's peak.

Anyway, here are a couple of the photographs I took which I liked best:




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First art show acceptance letter

Just a quick update. Even though I think I've been accepted into the Livonia show, I've received no official notification on it. However, this week I got a letter from the Lathrup Village show informing me that I was accepted, thus making this my first official show. This quite exciting, even if it is a smaller show.
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Art Show Applications

Just a quick update. Since my last post, I've applied to 2 shows.

Livonia Art from the Heart: June 10-11, 2006
This one cost $250 + $20 application fee. I haven't heard back yet whether or not I've been accepted, but my check for the $250 booth fee was cashed, so that's usually an indicator of acceptance (from what I've heard).

Lathrup Village Art in the Park: June 24-25, 2006
This one cost $125 + $20 application fee. No info on this one yet. The deadline was April 7th, but I see now it was extended to April 28, so I probably won't hear anything until May.

I'm still looking at other shows. I wanted to apply to the Plymouth Art in the Park, but that one was like $515 + $25. The deadline was yesterday, and I didn't send it in, so I guess I've made my decision on that one. Still looking for at least 2 or 3 more shows to apply for this year.
...click here to read more!