Much of the time I wander through my life without any particular game plan or goals. I follow my nose and my interests, and every so often it occurs to me that I should be doing something to further my newish career as an art photographer. I get a lot of online photo competition information, but mostly they cost money to enter, and I figure it’s a crap shoot anyway, so I don’t enter. For some reason (partly because it was local and didn’t cost anything) I decided to submit some photos to the Saskatoon Exhibition Showcase of the Arts competition in the appropriate division. For me, that was open/professional, which was the only category that applied. I almost missed getting my pieces in, due to terminal procrastination and deadline avoidance, but the day after I thought entries had closed (without me having addressed the issue) I realized I had the date wrong and still had time to get my entries in. I took this as a sign, and actually got them delivered several hours before the real deadline.
Fast forward to today, when we were to pick up our entries. The Ex and the art show were on all last week. I had received an email post by a painter who sent out a newsletter saying she had received a second and third placing in the original painting category. I figured that as I hadn’t heard anything about my work, I wasn’t in at the finish line, but that was fine as I knew my pieces would be seen by a lot of people while they were on display. Imagine my astonishment when I trailed in to the pick-up area this afternoon and found that I had won four awards for three photos! I got first, second and third place in the open/professional division, plus the People’s Choice award. Go figure. I suspect there is some sort of lesson to be gleaned from this, but I’m not sure what it might be. Possibly that there can actually be some positive returns for getting the work out there and meeting those deadlines. I might even have to follow through on some of the ones that require an entry fee one of these days!
On to the shots of today. I’ve been in garden mode quite a bit in the past week since the weather has continued rather lovely, the occasional torrential downpour aside. Note I said “in the garden”, not necessarily “gardening”–which means that quite a bit of the time I am wandering with the camera rather than applying myself to the endless and disheartening task of weeding.
Shot one features a now fairly regular visitor to the backyard bird feeder, one of the young bluejays. We have had bluejays consistently in the past, summer and winter, but have been through a bit of a bluejay “drought” this year, so it’s lovely to see them back in our territory. In fact, on Sunday morning we had seven of them lurking about the east side of our yard until the local merlin came screaming through and scattered them. This young fellow is just coming into his full adult plumage. A couple of weeks ago he looked ridiculous as his body was fully feathered but his head and neck were virtually bare. He resembled a small blue vulture. He’s still a little thin in the neck area, but coming along nicely.
Shot two is my Mickey at his ease in front of the fish pond. I think of much of the back yard this year as the “tangled garden” as it reminds me of the famous J E H MacDonald (Group of Seven) painting of that name. I don’t plant sunflowers. The birds deposit the seeds and I leave the ones that start to grow in acceptable places, and weed out the rest. It saves me the decision-making of where to plant them, although I do have to make decisions on where to “unplant” them.
The final three shots are of the artworks that did well for me at the show. The top one is “In the Woods”, which got the first place and the People’s Choice awards. This has been useful in confirming my recent thought that it should be one of the next images I have printed up much larger than usual and on stretched canvas. I get a few of these done each year, and as it is a bit of a pricier venture for me, I try to be quite selective about which images I use. I think this one has earned the right to the fancy presentation.
Image four is “Time’s Companions”, one of my “Time” series and a personal favourite. It got second place.
And finally we have “Chiaroscuro” (aka T. Hunter, which is the name of the cowboy) which took third place.
©Copyright 2010 by Judy Wood. See original post here.
To learn more about this artist, visit her website.
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