Melbourne Photographic Society Mini Market is being held at the Melbourne Assembly Rooms on Saturday March 18th, between 10am and 3pm. There’re over 25 different art and craft stalls, me being one of them! There’s also live ukulele music (maybe I’ll take mine and show them how not to do it), a raffle and refreshments being served.

Which pictures to take

I’m currently, printing, cutting and sticking a number of prints for the occasion. It’s always a tricky one, choosing the prints you think might sell. No two events are ever quite the same, I’m often surprised by how much interest a certain image receives. Whilst there aren’t many who don’t like a cute, red squirrel, seal pup or puffin, it’s often my slightly more abstract or serious looking images that garner interest.

shag, farne islands, wildlife photography talk

Getting it right

There’s a lot of effort that goes into producing a quality print. You can’t just use the same image you’ve uploaded to the internet. Images need to be profiled for the device and paper you’re printing to. Profiling an image means your print will closely match the image you’ve processed on screen. You also have to over brighten the image, so you image doesn’t look dull compared to the brightly lit version you’ve been used to viewing on your computer.

It all mounts up

Then you have to stick down and mount your pristine print without any lumps or bumps and get it into a clear bag without one spec of dust getting on the image, not easy, especially with a dark image in a black mount. I once had a picture framer tearing his hair our after he spent two hours trying to frame just such an image. He just couldn’t get the image back in the frame without any dust showing on it. The fact his workshop was dustier and more cluttered than my garden shed probably didn’t help. I couldn’t workout if his comment of “this has taken me so long I’m not making any money on it” was supposed to make me feel sorry for him. He was handling my print with such force, due to his frustration, that I told him to leave it and I’d finish it off myself; I never went back.

Now I try to do as much myself as I can. Nobody else will ever put as much effort and pride into your work as you will yourself. There’s a common notion that modern digital photography is easy … but that all depends on the level of quality you are satisfied with.

Anyway, I digress, Melbourne Assembly Rooms, March 18th, hope to see you there. I’ll be the one with a mug of tea and big wedge of cake in my mouth, yum yum!