This photo of me was taken earlier today while I was stretching a canvas photo to get ready for this Thursday’s Arizona Fine Art Expo opening.

Google+: View post on Google+

+Christine Hauber adjusts a light bar in our booth at the Arizona Fine Art Expo late last night. The 10 week show starts this Thursday, Jan. 19, 2012.

Google+: Reshared 1 times
Google+: View post on Google+

I am excited to announce that yesterday I delivered my first two (and soon to be many) photographs of mine that will both be on display & available for purchase at the Scottsdale International Auto Museum here in Arizona.

The photo included in this post, “Frontier Gas Station”, is one of the photographs I have on display there.

The museum, which features a very limited and select number of artists, has quite the car collection. In fact one of the cars there is the Howard Hughes 1936 Lincoln Aero-Mobile, recently appraised at over $2 million. Another is the race car Tom Cruise drove in Days of Thunder.

Entrance to the museum costs $10 and it is open daily. http://scottsdaleinternationalautomuseum.com/

FYI – I along with a few other artists will be there in person Nov. 18-20 during the Scottsdale International Classic Car Auction event held at the museum.

Google+: View post on Google+

Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell.

So I am really starting to think that after getting hit by a microburst last year and a dirt devil today that my art festival tent just isn’t quite as straight as it once used to be…

Google+: View post on Google+

Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell.

I am doing an outdoor art festival this weekend in Oro Valley, AZ. Beautiful weather – not a cloud in the sky and temp around 90.

And then early afternoon we get hit by a dirt devil – sort of like a mini tornado with wind gusts up to 50mph.

Artwork and tents flying in the air. One tent – an ez-up – traveled about 2 football field lengths in the air before it crashed down.

I took a direct hit – fortunately some peeps in the area helped me hold my tent down. Could’ve been a lot worse for me – only lost 2 pieces. Other artists lost much more. Glad to hear no-one got hurt.

Google+: View post on Google+

Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell.

Yesterday I was interviewed live on tv for Good Morning Vail before the start of Sunday’s Beaver Creek Art Festival.

In the short nearly 5 minute video I talk about a couple of my newest photography pieces of old cars and gas stations using the HDR photography technique.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I have arrived and am all set up and ready to go for this weekend’s opening at the Art Barn in Pinetop, Arizona – my studio for the summer for the second consecutive year. I will be joined with nearly a dozen artists as we display and sell our work in a gallery style setting on weekends throughout the summer.

My display at the Pinetop Art Barn.

I will be showing many of my newest photographs – so new that I haven’t had a chance to get them onto my website yet. Many were taken during a week long photo trip Christine Hauber and I did last week in the Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico area. You can view some beautiful photographs that were photographed with my iPhone camera here.

The above photo was photographed with my iPhone camera in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Upcoming Workshop updates:

Christine and I are still working on scheduling for our upcoming photo workshops later this year.

What I can tell you is that I will soon be announcing one-on-one photo classroom workshops with myself in Pinetop, Arizona this summer. Full and half-day sessions will be available. Course subjects will be whatever you need help from in learning be it HDR, Photoshop, RAW, Printing, Stretching Canvas, getting ready for Art Festivals, etc.

Christine and I are also working out the final details involving a 5-day Santa Fe Photo Workshop. This workshop will feature at least one day photographing between Santa Fe, New Mexico and Taos, New Mexico. Not only will you have the opportunity to photograph the beauty of Northern New Mexico, but you will also be able to study HDR, Photoshop, as well as Printing and Stretching Canvas in a classroom setting.

The days of the workshop will be Monday through Friday and we are looking at late August or early September to hold it. This is going to be a great workshop and one you will not want to miss. Classes will be limited and we are probably only going to be able to offer this workshop once this year. If you are really interested and want to be the first to know more details about this workshop simply email me with the email subject of: Santa Fe Photography Workshop.

Other workshops Christine and I are working on include classroom workshops involving HDR, Photoshop, and Printing and Stretching Canvas. These will be held in the Phoenix (and possibly Tucson) area sometime late October to early December.

If you haven’t already, feel free to sign up for my newsletter – you can find the link to the right of this post.

Well I’m hitting the road again after a fun weekend in Lawton, OK at the Arts for All Festival.

It’s great doing some of these smaller art shows that are sort of off the beaten path. Living and traveling full-time in my RV really allows me the opportunity to see all sorts of people and communities.

This boa was only 14 months old. It was a rescue animal.

I learned this weekend that Lawton really loves it’s animals. At the show I saw one snake, 2 ferrets, and even a monkey all being carried around the necks of different patrons.

This was a 4 year old monkey the owner rescued.

I also learned that people really are named Bubba – cool – thought that was only in the movies.

Well the show is now over, the trailer packed again, and I set my sights now for Santa Fe, NM for a week or so of photography and scouting for locations for a possible photo workshop there later this year.

Thanks for a great time Lawton!

This Friday through Sunday, May 13-15 marks the 2011 Lawton Oklahoma Arts For All Festival. I have already set up my booth in spot #73 and am ready for the Friday afternoon opening.

My booth at the Lawton Oklahoma Arts for All Festival

The show features some 90 juried artists as well as food, entertainment and wine. This is the first ever art show for me in the state of Oklahoma and I am certainly looking forward to it.

Last weekend I was at the Cottonwood Art Festival outside of Dallas, TX. In between shows, rather than having any photography opportunities I instead had to take care of some very important vehicle maintenance.

I had discovered when I arrived in Dallas a couple cracks in the tow hitch assembly on my vehicle. Not wanting to risk losing my trailer on the highway I immediately had the hitch replaced.

Glad I noticed this crack - of which there were two of them.

Next up was replacing some worn trailer tires. Seems like replacing tires is becoming a common theme in my travels to Texas – last year I avoided 2 blown tires that had huge cracks in the inside sidewalls on my truck. The trailer tires were not that bad, but getting close.

Texas and tires seem to be a good match for me lately.

And the threat of bad hail and thunderstorms prevented any other photography for me mid-week and caused me to drive some 125 miles completely out of the way to position me and my rig out of harms way.

I had driven to Vernon, TX (see blue circle) to avoid the weather. All of these storms were moving NE and had completely gone around my location.

Fortunately all of the storms have passed and I am looking forward to incredibly great weather this weekend. If you are in the Lawton, Oklahoma area here is the directions to the show.

A beautiful weather weekend is in store for this weekend's show.

December 13, 2010

There’s a great quote in one of my favorite movies of all time – the 1998 movie The Big Lebowski – in which The Stranger says, “Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes, well, he eats you.”

Well, fellow photographer and artist Christine Hauber and I recently got eaten by the bear at an “art festival” put on by a local Art Center, and the bear is Zapplication (Zapp). For us artists, Zapp is a website through which the vast majority of shows are now relying on to facilitate the jurying of their art festivals. Seems simple for the artists: log into their website, find a show in your area, select your 3 or 4 or 5 digital images of your best artwork and include a booth photo of your typical display, explain you and your artwork in 100 characters or less, pay a jury fee, and wait to hear if you get into the show or not.

No more getting in touch with the shows to have them mail you an application, no more filling out application forms, getting slides made of your artwork, and no more mailing out application forms hoping they arrive before the deadline. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Shows are popping up all over the country lately on Zapp hoping we apply to their shows. It is a great opportunity for the show: they get a nationwide pool of artists already signed up to Zapp from which to draw from, they add some splashy marketing text explaining how their show is the best one to apply for, and they rake in the money in jury fees from hundreds to even thousands of artists hoping to fill 50, 100, 200, maybe 300 available spots.

And every once in a while, the jurying part of the show just completely fails. You give the show a little credit in advance – take for example an area Arts Center putting on the show – so you should be confident that you will be entering a well juried fine art festival, right?

Enter the hungry bear…

Wooden clothes pins to display loose photos?? At a juried fine art festival? Really?!?

As artists applying to fine art festivals, we expect – and the public expects – a tightly juried show where quality is paramount to their festival. Quality of artwork and quality of presentation. While quality of artwork can be subjective, there are pretty common guidelines representing quality of presentation.

Now I am not saying there is a time and a place for such a presentation – but the time and place should not be a juried fine art festival, put on by an Arts Center. In the above photo, this person’s display consisted of photos strung along a clothes line with wooden clothes pins holding them up. And this wasn’t even the only booth with such a display!

I split the blame between Zapp and the festival jurying the show, with the victims ending up being the participating artists as well as the attending patrons. Zapp has become a juggernaut in the art festival application process, making it way too easy for art festivals to collect tons more in application fees for their shows than what was previously possible, and reducing the overall quality of shows.

Not all art festivals are allowing bad work - how do we keep it that way?

One would think this would mean a much better juried art festival, but every once in a while the system simply breaks down. In today’s digital age, it is way too easy to produce great looking jury photos that often don’t even closely represent what an artist actually is displaying. Zapp has made the jurying of artists too random and impersonal.

Getting juried into a show isn’t about a body of work, artist biographies, and experience any more. It’s all just about those 4 or 5 photos that may not even quite represent what the artist truly offers and which certainly doesn’t prove that the artist in fact even created the artwork themselves (of which should be the subject of another blog post).

The "Evil Empire" of art festival jurying?

Zapp has the ability to have the shows request more information about the artist and their artwork in the application process. Shows like the La Jolla Festival of the Arts require more fields to be filled out when applying, asking more about you as an artist. They appear to not just rely on a couple images and 100 characters – they take the time to get more information about the artist to help them jury a higher caliber of artist.

The shows themselves need to take this upon themselves to improve the look of their show and attract the right patrons to the show they are advertising. They need to take the time to read and consider more information about the artists they are considering allowing into their art festivals. In the last few years I have noticed a decline in the quality of artists at shows that have billed themselves as having the best artists around. I have talked to fabulous artists who did not get into these shows that really deserved to be there. And I have heard patrons comment that the quality of certain shows has gone down in the last few years – a direct result of the jurying process.

It really seems from my perspective that the more that shows rely on Zapp’s basic application process, the more these shows suffer from a quality standpoint of accepted artists. This in turn dramatically affects the number and quality of the patrons attending the show. Patrons may expect to see the photographer shown above displaying their work at a craft show or flea market, but certainly not at an art festival. I know of many patrons who have stopped going to certain shows due to the drop in quality of the artists accepted into the show.

Zapp has made it way to easy for shows to find artists, dramatically increasing the amount of applicants to these shows. The increase in applications reduces the odds of getting into a show (the 2010 Cherry Creek show received 2251 applications for just 230 spaces). It increases the amount of money a show brings in in application fees (which typically range from $25 to $50).

But with an increase in applicants comes an increase in the time needed to jury a show. This is probably why most shows do not ask for more information like La Jolla does. Instead these shows jury artists based the 4 or 5 images you have, spending perhaps 10 seconds per artist during a first round screening.

How do we change the system? Does it need changing? Are you happy or upset with the way our artwork is juried for Zapp shows? Do you agree or disagree with my observations? Has the quality of shows gone downhill recently? Feel free to add your comments below.