Salon Mentoring

Last Wednesday I had mentoring session for the WA Photographic Salon 2022, my first session of this type in my fledgling career and probably not the last. The basic setup is that people entering the Salon were allowed to meet with some of the potential judges/mentors for the Salon, bring along at least two prints of their work and within 30 minutes a mentor talks to a group of entrants.

I’m not going to lie here but I was having some anxiety for this process, mostly because I’m still not sure of myself as a photographer in a world that often has demanss on technical perfection, and being somewhat artistically orientated I had no idea if there is even a place for me at the table… not helped that I’m not 100% confident in one of the pieces I submitted wouldn’t be ripped to pieces, or worst my best photo would be savaged within an inch of it’s life.

Life with anxiety is fun kids.

So here are the two images I presented and I’ll go over the overall impressions I got.

Bodies Moving Through Space - 2022

This is part of a series of images called “Bodies Moving Through Space” based on image I produced last year for the Pythonesque series (link here in the Portfolio section). I have talked about the production in a previous blog entry “Hello Darkness, My Old Friend…”, however I didn’t show much of the series partly because I’m still working on it for my end of year exhibition and partly because… in all honestly I thought I screwed it all up.

My goal was the achieve a nice clean ghosting of the movement with having a consistent black background and I had to late minute jerry-rig the studio and I forgot to bring the pins I was wanting to use, so I used some studio flats that unfortunately had tape that bounced the continuous light back to the lens and created some artifacting on the image.

I was honestly really disappointed at my production and thought I had royally screwed up and sad so on the review, except everyone else loved it including the lecturer. In consultation with my lecturer this one was chosen for the Salon and whilst I have been getting great feedback from everyone so far I was ready for it be torn apart by impartial judges.

Except that didn’t happen.

I’m still not fully confident this isn’t part of some elaborate prank but everyone I shown liked this image, it’s abstract nature and weirdness I think is more of the charm. I did get questions on certain parts and I answered as honestly as possible (mostly the lines etc), but overall it was incredibly positive. Surely this cannot last on the best photo I’ve ever taken….

Backstage at Clue - 2021

Words cannot describe how insanely proud I am of this work, and strangely protective of it. This is this first time I’ve publicly shown this piece as I’ve entered into a couple of competitions now but it’s never really gone anywhere, which definitely takes some of the wind out of one’s sails.

This is an image using of my favourite techniques, HDR, and was just almost too perfect a show that I had to take it, and given the smallest window I had to make it work and time needed to take it I had to mentally shoot it way before I pulled the camera out of my bag. I’m not saying it was all my expert skills at play but it’s as much as the right settings and the right time and all my knowledge at play to craft and imho great image, as long as I didn’t fuck it up between the shoot and the post-production and the print.

So this was the one I had a lot of my heart and drive put into, and I almost didn’t enter it because I was afraid of it being butchered by better photographers then I’ll probably ever be. For the first time in a long time I was afraid for whatever left of ego to take abuse. It’s not to say I don’t mind criticism, I love it in fact, but I was afraid people would just dismiss this work more then anyway.

Boy howdy was I in for a surprise.

Everyone loved it.

The judges all caught onto the things that I thought made it an interesting image, the colour choice, the framing, the objects, and some picked up on things I didn’t even think of like the lines on the floor and wall, the blue cushion on the settee vs the orange lights on the back wall. The only criticism I got was an admittedly minor one about the highlight on the left of the image and they even said it would have been hard to fix.

All this being said, I don’t think I’ll win anything with these images.

There are 100 spots for the exhibition opening on July 14th and with 300 photographs submitted I’m confident one of my images will be on the walls, but as for Gold and Silver prizes I don’t think I’ll achieve that so I’m just hoping to pass through to the exhibition. I would like to say anything else on top of that would be a bonus but I just don’t think I’m anywhere near there yet, plus there are some outstanding photographers in my class who will more than likely get the gongs before I do. Hopefully one day, but unlikely today.

S