Yesterday I had three visitors: the two curators of the CPA In Motion Exhibition and the Champion for the show. The Champion is the manager of an exhibition, and is responsible for making sure everybody knows what they have to do, and that they do it.
I showed my guests work prints from the Staccato series. There were two piles. The largest were 22×30 Epson 9800 prints on Arches Infinity paper, which has a smooth matte surface. That’s the paper I used when I first started the series, and it’s a good paper for showing work where the lighting is not optimum and reflections can be a problem. However, I’m now printing the series on C-sized (17×22) Epson Exhibition Fiber paper with an Epson 4900. The paper gives me a Dmax north of 2.3 as compared to the matte paper’s 1.7, and the deep blacks work well with the night images. The downside is reflections; although the Exhibition Fiber surface is not quite glossy – it’s akin to unferrotyped F-finish silver gelatin paper – it’s pretty reflective. In the exhibition, the gloss won’t be a problem since the lighting is well away from the viewing axis.
It took about half an hour to go through 30 or 40 prints. We talked about what size would be right. The CPA has 22×28 plex, and, with 4 inches of mat board and half an inch of reveal on each side of the image, that would mean making the image area 19 inches wide. This is will fit on the C-sized paper with an inch and a half of margin. We’ll probably have one large print, and maybe several smaller ones. I’ve had enough experience hanging other artists’ shows in the CPA gallery to know that we can get 40 or 50 22×28 mats on the walls before it starts to look crowded. Since I’ll be sharing the gallery with Hal Eastman, I should be thinking in terms of half that many.
At the end of the meeting I agreed to send the curators a CD with medium-resolution JPEGs of about 60 images, and they’d pick from that group.
Today, I fired up Lightroom, and started to whittle down the series so I could make the CD. I’ve composited and saved about 600 images in the three years I’ve been working on this series. 117 of them I’ve given three or more stars to. I started by looking at all the two-star images to make sure I hadn’t missed something great. I hadn’t.
Then I went through all the three-star pictures, and gave the ones I thought might be good for the show four stars. When I was done, I had 80 four and five-star photographs. I worked that down to 64 by giving some of them 3 stars. I checked the number of five-star images, and counted 16.
I did an export from Lightroom with 2100 pixels the largest dimension, burned the images onto CDs, sent them off, and emailed the curators, asking them to look at the stars to see which images are my favorites.
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