Yay, an Honorable Mention!

A couple of days ago I received my "December Bay" photo back from the Gillette Nature Association winter photo contest I had submitted it to.  I didn't think it had received anything, but when I opened the envelope, there was an honorable mention ribbon inside, and velcro on the back of the piece from where it had been displayed for a month in the visitor center!  That was pretty cool!  The contest had been advertised statewide, including on the Michigan.gov website, which was where I saw it.

They also sent a flyer for their next photo contest, which is deeply intriguing, (fungus and lichens... a perfect subject for microscope work!)  However, my husband is moving us to a new state soon, so I don't know if I'll be able to enter.

Here's the honorably mentioned photo:

On Barren Trees

I wish other artists would stop with the nothing-but-barren-tree-branches-in-winter photos. Every artist (myself included) has barren-branch pics; yet these artists think they're so innovative/deep with their shots that ANYBODY can get. OMG people. Keep your branch pics to yourself. Everybody has them. Anybody (including the most inexperienced photographer) can take one that looks good, and they're just plain too easy. If you're a professional photographer, don't offer a product that can be easily duplicated by somebody picking up a camera for the first time. Find a more creative way to express the mood you want to invoke. Isn't that what artists are paid for?

/rant

New Home on the Net

Zatista finally approved my work last week, (it took about two weeks to go through their review process,) so my work has a new home on the web! I've only put the 5x7's (matted and framed to 8x10) up, and two 8x10's matted & framed to 11x14, but the important thing is that the art is out there.

Check it out: http://store.zatista.com/Microscape

I like Zatista a lot better than I liked GoZabo. There are no fibercrafts, the site is professional without being pretentious, and the search functions are really good. Plus, it's all original, limited edition art, so you're not competing with prints from dead masters.

Here's hoping for a long and profitable future there.

I'm re-naming the cat "Stewie"

A funny thing happened to me yesterday while photographing snowflakes. I was out on the back porch, and the cat was inside the house meowing to come out with me. I ignored him and continued with my work until my fingers got too cold to work correctly, at which point I usually go inside. When I went to go back in, the deadbolt was locked. The cat had actually trapped me out on the back porch in the freezing cold!

Our chest freezer is by the back door, and Marley (our cat) likes to lay on it. We knew he could reach the deadbolt because we've watched him paw at it before. He knows it makes a fun clicking noise, and he knows the humans use the shiny things to open the door. He's never really shown any interest in it when we're outside, though; usually he's on the floor meowing to come out.

Yesterday, he must have put two and two together and tried to let himself out by switching the deadbolt over. If we lived in a house, there wouldn't have been a problem. However, we live in a second-floor apartment. There was no way for me to get down from the deck. I didn't have a phone, keys, gloves, or a hat; just my coat, boots, and laptop. I started banging on the door to try to wake my husband, who was sleeping at the time, but he didn't hear me because our room is pretty far from the back door.

Luckily I had a wi-fi connection out there, so I actually put a "HELP I'M TRAPPED!" message on facebook asking somebody to call the leasing office. About 20 minutes later, maintenance was there to open the door. The whole thing was really funny, once I warmed up. Who actually gets locked out of their house by their CAT?

The art of Waiting

Waiting seems to be the name of the game right now: waiting for new snow to fall, waiting for a few contests to be judged, waiting for a new website to approve my work so that I can start selling again.

I'm hoping my new store on the web will be on Zatista. It seems to be a really solid site with an emphasis on quality work, and the commission they take is really low. (They only take 18%, as opposed to 40% at museum shows and 50% at the gallery.) Zatista is definitely more professional than GoZabo was, so naturally their approval process is lengthier; but I can't see a reason why they wouldn't approve me. The four images I submitted to them have sold relatively well here.

Web Homeless

Oh GREAT.

I just found out that Gozabo, the site where I sold my photos online, has gone down, with absolutely no warning to the artists. I'm not sure if it's forever, or how long it's been down, but it appears that I now need to shop for a new web presence. Boffo.

Ah well. Fresh start, fresh opportunities.

Contest entry for Gardening Gone Wild

One of my hobbies is gardening, so when I saw a photo contest on Gardening Gone Wild with the theme of Winter's Beauty, I knew I had to submit an entry, and I knew which shot it had to be.


This shot was taken with the field microscope in one of the vegetable boxes on the deck, and I was really happy with the fact that I got the snowflake in the process of melting, but managed to capture it before the detail of the heart of the snowflake had melted away. I thought it worked well for the garden blog contest, because not only does it show snow, but also magnified soil, and I think they play well together.

Snow is my "KHAAAAANNNN!!!"

Snow is proving itself to be the bane of my existence. I must've been really lucky last year. Here it is, almost February, and many of my best shots from this year are just mediocre. The snow has been the same old thing, and my equipment is really frustrating me. The digital field microscope only captures 3 megapixels; my phone takes higher-res pictures. Granted, the field of vision is a lot smaller on the microscope, so you don't need as many megapixels, but the frustrations are still there. Also, the depth is challenging. Many potentially awesome shots are marred by a blurry patch from something being a millimeter closer to the camera (or further away) in the shot, and because the imperfection is tiny and made of ice, I can't move it out of the way. (The radiant heat would melt the flake I'm trying to capture, even with gloves or the use of a tool.)

A friend and fellow artist suggested that I enter some contests to get my morale back, and I've taken her advice by entering a landscape shot I got while walking the dog along the bay at my parents' place in a couple of competitions. The next post is actually going to be a contest entry for one of the photomicrographs, so if that post seems out of place with the tone of the rest of the blog, that's why.

Other than that, things are relatively slow in my little art world, with the exception of receiving an email from Dennos with an application for their small works show in May attached. I'm excited to try out some new shots and see how they sell. I'm hoping to do better this year than last year, and last year I sold five.

First Snow of '09

Since my last post, I've been fighting a bit of artists' block. The co-op (not surprisingly) fell through, because artists are generally flighty and disorganized. It was a little bit of a letdown, but I didn't have my hopes very high in the first place.

Between then and now, I've been fighting off feelings of being completely uninspired. Everything that I thought had the potential to be interesting under a microscope fell through. Frost is uninteresting ice hexes. Sulfite crystals that form on wine corks look like boring old amethyst. My last hope rested in snow.

Snow is unbelievably challenging to photograph. The subjects are only there for a few seconds, the distance from the lens is constantly changing as they melt, and each snowflake is generally attached to bits of other flakes, if not several other whole ones. All of this makes it extremely difficult to capture a whole snowflake, all by itself, in focus.

Today was the first flake-forming snow of the year at our house, which meant throwing on gear and getting outside as soon as I woke up. I took 128 shots, and was really only happy with one flake, but it was enough to restore my inspiration. My goal of having a whole portfolio of decent snow shots might actually become a reality. Here's a heavily cropped, low-res image of that lovely little flake.

The museum sale went... okay. I sold two pieces. It definitely wasn't my best show, but I talked to some other artists, and they were disappointed with their sales, too. I'm glad it wasn't just me.

I found a note that I had overlooked on my last payment receipt from the gallery asking me for more stuff. (whoops!) It's been almost a month since I received that. I want to see what the plans for this new co-op are before I get back with her, though, because under my current gallery contract I wouldn't be able to do both.

Nothing new to report; hopefully I'll have something interesting to post after the co-op meeting.

Things are Looking Up!

Sales picked up during the summer at the gallery. I sold 5 pieces, which was good.

I'm also in another sale at Dennos, which starts later today and ends Sunday. This one is much more exclusive, and I've already sold a piece! I went in yesterday morning to set up my table, and there were a few museum visitors milling about, looking at the inuit art collection and pre-Columbian American gold exhibit. A couple made their way over to my table to see my work, and after some admiration of the snow pieces, the lady decided she had to have the "Perfect Snowflake" print. They bought it on the spot, and I didn't even have to give Dennos any commission, because the sale hadn't started yet! (I did replace the Perfect Snowflake print before the end of the day though, so that everything I had on my table was true to the inventory sheet I'd turned in.) It was very exciting.

To add to the excitement, another artist saw the exchange, came over to look at my work, and invited me to be a part of an artist co-op that's starting up. They've got a show/retail space on Front Street (tourist gold!) and I'm going to attend their meeting on Tuesday to see if it's something I'd like to be involved with. It sounds kind of promising. My current gallery is on Front Street, but they take a commission of 50%. It would be nice to be in a more beneficial situation.

Update

The museum sale went really well! I sold five pieces out of ten submitted, which is better than average. Also, I was able to donate 4 more pieces to various silent auctions in the area, and, while they didn't sell for very much, at least my work is out there for people to see.

According to the folks at the gallery, people aren't quite sure what they're looking at when they see my work, despite the informational tags. Everybody thinks it's cool and amazing when they see the piece and find out what it is, but then nobody buys the work. I've found the same to be true with my website, despite the site creators making me a featured artist for free. It's disheartening.

I'm beginning to think that the best way for me to make money at this is to do art fairs; but the expense to do that is huge. When I can talk to people and explain my methods and the backstory to the piece, they usually make the purchase, but I don't want to have to sell a minimum of ten pieces in one day to just cover the booth expense.

My first museum art sale...

Dennos Museum is hosting a small works art exhibit and sale in May, and my photomicrography prints are totally in! It will be a good chance to introduce some new work to the public, maybe some color images and more abstract stuff than the series at the gallery. Of course, it will also be a good chance to create some publicity for the series on sale, too. Yay for being a shameless art-whore!

Hotshot!

One of our local news stations has a nightly bit called the "weather hotshot," which features a photograph of the weather, taken by a viewer. Last Saturday, the coolest meteorologist of them all, (who also happens to be a personal friend,) featured one of my photomicrographs, below, of a snowflake! It was very exciting!

Unfortunately, it happened during a weekend when the rest of my family was downstate, but my sister was able to record it for all to see.

It's good to have awesome friends in television.

Retail Ready at Last!

For the past four weeks, I'd been worrying about my official "retail ready" gallery deadline, which happens to be tomorrow. I'd never sold work before this series, so I had a lot to do, and a lot of mistakes to make. Whenever I made progress, it didn't seem tangible, and there were many setbacks. However, sitting here looking at the sheer number of pieces that I made during that time, I'm experiencing an unprecedented sense of accomplishment. There are two framed 16x20's, two framed 11x14's, six framed 8x10's, eight matted 11x14's, and eight matted 5x7's. That's a total of 26 pieces that had to be printed, cut, mounted, signed, and sometimes framed. In addition, I had to design description cards from scratch for each image, and attach those to the finished pieces.

It was a lot of work, but I learned so much about photo printing and mounting. The finished pieces look really great.

I hope I get to do this again someday.

A Little Bit of Backstory...

The posts I originally made when this blog started didn't really give a history of how the ball got rolling for me. Here's some backstory. (Note: this was written in October 2009, but I backdated it so that it would show up at the beginning of the blog.)

In December of 2008, I got a microscope with the intent of using it for rockhounding, which is one of my other hobbies. However, it was the middle of one of the harshest winters we've had in a long time, and there were few rocks to hound. I ended up turning my shiny new microscope toward things that were nearby. Soon, the Secrets of a Modern Kitchen series was born. Here's the image that started it all, which I call "Table Salt on Cork".

Secrets of a Modern Kitchen dealt with simple kitchen ingredients as subjects, including salt, sugar, oil & water, condensation, and more. Later, after I tired of kitchen subjects, (it was a looong winter,) I turned the microscope on the snowflakes outside. Snow is incredibly challenging to photograph, and I'm still not quite pleased with those images. (However, they do sell well.)

After receiving much encouragement from friends and family, I decided to shop local galleries to see if they were interested. Art and Soul Gallery picked up my kitchen series right away, much to the surprise of my now-husband. His mother is an artist, so he knew how hard it could be to get a gallery contract. Luckily, we live in a community that strongly supports local and emerging artists, so I was able to find a gallery who would give me a chance.

That should be sufficient backstory to get a reader started on this blog, which is really nothing more than the chronicle of an emerging artist. I hope you enjoy your visit!