July 25th, 2006
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Inundated
Last night my goal was to start building a candidates list for the postcard section of my show. This left me with the realization of a mixed blessing. The first “problem” is that 95% of my photo archive does not confirm to the filing system I indoctrinated after returning from France. Of course this is natural since I didn’t decide upon it until recently, but judging by the amount of files I have, it appears to require at least ten hours of manual labor. At first glance even Siren looks like it may not be much help. This brings me to the second part of my problem.
I have catalogued nearly six thousand images on the PowerShot in the last two and a half years. Over half of it is in raw format, which means I have over 2800 pictures to choose from for the show. I was planning on only including eight for postcards, but the volume of source material is staggering. Just reviewing all that material will take days. I’ll be the last to acknowledge that I take photographs of quality, but even I won’t have trouble finding eight that I like from a set of nearly three thousand. I may need to rethink my strategy somewhat, because I’m still seriously lacking in analog material for the big prints. And since those are the items that are going to be catching people’s eyes, pulling them away from the next booth and into mine, they’re a lot more important than the postcards. The problem is quality because the maximum resolution the PowerShot provides is images at 96 dpi, well below the 300 needed for printing. So I can downsample and get a maximum document size of about 8.5 x 6 inches. If I’m to use any of them for marquee material, I have to decide how much quality I’ll sacrifice for size. Or I suppose I could tile a bunch of postcard-sized shots together into a collage. That may be a separate interesting piece in itself. One poster-size montage with blurring and interweaving of the photographs… ::sigh:: I may be missing something fairly fundamental here, but you’ll have to go easy on me, I’m new to the whole taking photography beyond the blog level. If you have some suggestions, as always please feel free to let me know.
Sorry, this is mainly to myself, but it has helped. The way to most effectively use the material I have is to fully realize the limitations and strengths inherent in my work. Know yourself, and you can defeat anyone.
