Saturday, November 15, 2008

Portfolio Challenge 2008

I am really falling behind on my postings. The learning blog, putting together some books and for the first time actually considering putting together a portfolio has kept me pretty busy.

On November 4th, I participated in the Northwest Houston Photo Club Portfolio Challenge. The club does this every year but this is the first year that I have participated.

The members that participate put together a portfolio of ten to fifteen prints mounted as for a formal gallery presentation. The club persuades a number of people from professional photographers, galleries or the art community to come in and critique the portfolios. This year we had five professional photographers, one with twenty seven years of college level teaching. Some of the members got critiques from four of the judges, I wanted to get home to Janet so we could meet everyone for dinner afterwards so I only got three which is probably good. If one more person told me that I had to find a place to display my prints my head would not have fit inside the car.

For the challenge, I put together a portfolio on the theme of Randomness, a theme I have used in my photography for many years. Randomness is what I call spontaneous design. It is the result of happenstance rather than human consciousnesses. I usually describe it as clothes tossed onto a chair at night, the bed covers in the morning, splatters or drips of paint, the layering of torn advertising posters, designs that are created purely at random by happenstance.

All three judges approached the photographs differently but all three were extremely encouraging. It was very much an ego inflating experience.

As a result I have been going through my photographs to see If I can get a couple of portfolios together to print. The Randomness portfolios with the judges comments are located in the Portfolio Challenge 2008 set on Flickr. There are several newer sets with some of the images that I am looking at as possible portfolios.

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