April 2, 2010, 3:45 pm
The Paddler - Iona, Scotland - 2006
I am chuffed; Fotomoto has selected my Edge of the Unconscious picture as their “featured image” for today, April 2! It will be interesting to see if that leads to any income for Save The Children but if it doesn’t straight away, well, every bit of exposure helps. At least someone thought well enough of it to allow it to represent Fotomoto for the day.
The Paddler photograph above was made two shots later on the same afternoon and from the same vantage point on the ferry quay, Iona, Scotland. The sunlit aquamarine could be the Caribbean backdrop for a super model fashion shoot but instead it is in the North Atlantic and she is an everywoman archetype; a stand in for all of us that would rather be paddling than working in the office this April second. For this brief moment she was doing what every tired mother dreams of when the laundry still needs to be folded and the three year old upstairs just awoke, coughing.
March 21, 2010, 7:48 pm
Ross of Mull in Rain
I have no illusions about making a living from photography but I would like to be able to offer more financial support to a small number of charities working in the areas I care most about; I want to make a difference even if only a very small one. What if I could sell prints of the photographs on this site and donate the proceeds? That thinking, and Google, led me to Fotomoto this week. “Looking for a hassle-free way to sell your art?” asks the front page of the Fotomoto web site; yes, I am.
What is Fotomoto? To quote a little more from the site it “… is an e-commerce system that gives independent photographers and web publishers the power to sell their work on their own site, using a simple toolbar with a ‘click to buy’ button.
It took me only a few minutes to add the line of code necessary to enable the Fotomoto shopping cart on my web site; I tinkered for a while longer to get it to look exactly the way I wanted on the page but it really is as simple as their marketing says. I have not turned the shopping cart on yet; the technical integration may be easy but there are other questions to answer before I do that. In particular: how much should I charge and does the quality of the finished prints and cards justify the price. To that end I have placed an order for a 12×18 print and a 5×7 card. “Ross of Mull in Rain”, above, is the image I chose for the card; “Edge of the Unconscious,” used for an earlier blog posting is the one I selected for the larger print.
How does it work? How is the print made? When someone places an order for an image that you have not sold before, you are sent an email asking you to upload a high resolution version; the order remains in a pending state until you have provided this ‘original.’ It’s not really an original, Fotomoto does not accept Photoshop files and the like, it’s just a high quality TIFF or JPEG file. In my case these turned out to be 68 and 32 megabytes respectively; they took a few minutes to upload!
Now, with the masters in hand, Fotomoto has the files digitally rendered as C prints on Kodak Endura paper. The results are then packed in a flat box and shipped via UPS [edit: I misread, it was actually USPS]. Including the slightly more expensive 3 day instead of 5 day shipping option, my total was $27.29 with no profit markup. I’ll let you know in The Fotomoto Experiment – Part 2 how long it takes to deliver and whether it was worth the money.
Fotomoto takes care of the sales tax if any is warranted; they are the merchant of record so they are responsible for the taxes. The company operates out of California and thus, for now at least, that is the only state for which buyers will be hit with sales tax. A fair number of the site’s users are from outside the U.S. and may have different national tax and VAT rules to take into account for their sales but for a naturalized Texan, life is simple.
While you can’t see the Fotomoto toolbar working on my site yet, you can try it out on many others including:
Or just go to Fotomoto and browse their catalog at http://www.fotomoto.com/
February 22, 2010, 12:31 am
Two mooring lines, Tobermory
The artist Andy Goldsworthy’s mode of work could not be much further from that of my landscape photography: he assembles his art within the landscape, gathering and using materials from the surrounding area, whereas I forbid myself from moving so much as a pebble or twig to improve the composition. What we do and how we do it are very different but there is, for me at least, a resonance in spirit.
I do not mean to suggest that what I do reaches anything close to the creativity, quality or power of Goldsworthy’s art. He imbibes the landscape and then responds in imaginative and painstakingly constructed sculpture; I merely frame what I see and move on. Nevertheless, despite the separation in our talent, technique and skill, we seem to be reacting to similar triggers and I take some encouragement from that. I had lost faith in natural mystery and wonder, my prime motive for making photographs; seeing Goldsworthy’s art rekindled that feeling in me.
Hopefully, “fair use” rules allow my inclusion of a few small photographs of some of Goldsworthy’s sculptures but I am not comfortable using anything larger that might risk crossing the line between fair use and any perception that I might be passing his work of as my own. If you like what you see then you must really go on and find more and larger examples from the references below, from a Google search of your own, or (better yet) by visiting some of his longer lived works at museums around the world.
The above three images are Copyright © Andy Goldsworthy.
See also:
Conversation: Andy Goldsworthy, Art Beat, National Public Radio
Andy Goldsworhy: Roof, National Gallery of Art
Andy Goldsworthy Digital Catalogue DVD (Volume One: 1976-1986)
Andy Goldsworthy, Morning Earth article
September 26, 2008, 5:50 pm
Tobermory Post Office, Isle of Mull
The VFXY Photos theme for the week is “Red”; this is my submission. You can see all the submissions to the current VFXY theme at /photos.vfxy.com/themes/.
Tobermory is the major town on the Isle of Mull, off the west coast of Scotland. It is famous for the row of colorfully painted stores that line it’s sheltered harbor. A great place to depart from for sailing, whale watching or fishing.
British postal vans are red and yellow so it is only natural that the tiny post office, one of the harbor row, should also be red and yellow. Throw in a green door, window and some clothes and you have a rather strong primary color soup.
September 23, 2008, 8:40 pm
Edge of the Unconscious
I don’t think I would ever single out one photograph that I have made as the most significant or pleasing to me, but if I was forced to pick my top five then this would probably be the first one I selected.
The picture was taken on a July day in the summer of 2006. The right half of the picture is filled with a concrete boat ramp that stands next to the main ferry dock on the island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland. The dark lines to the right of the man are the shadows of the railings of the main dock. The rings set in the concrete are used to tie up smaller boats as they load and unload passengers or fishing gear. That is how the picture came about but that is not what it means for me; this is not a holiday snap for the family album.
Detail
The man contemplating the water is older than I am but not by so many years that I cannot identify with him. At first sight he is overweight but that is an illusion, mostly, caused by the positioning of his left arm. He is barefoot; appropriate for a tourist paddling at the seaside but maybe he is something else? Maybe he has been shipwrecked or maybe he is on a pilgrimage in shoe-less penance? Those might be pajamas he is wearing; he might be in a hospital awaiting tests? It is hard to see in the full picture but in the detail, shown to the right, you can make out a bag around his shoulder – he is on a journey.
Water and the sea can be symbols for many things. In Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, the ocean is a woman to be loved and honored but also “something that gave or withheld great favours.” The sea is the original source of life and continuing source of food, a parent, yet it offers no guarantees or compassion. The sea grants and then takes away Santiago’s prize.
In dreams, Carl Jung wrote, the sea is a symbol of our Collective unconscious, “because unfathomed depths lie concealed beneath its reflecting surface.” When you cross the sea you do not know what lies under you; you cannot see where you are going or where you came from. The sea represents the unknown and the unknowable; the sea represents mystery.
In Christian baptism, going down into the water symbolizes death. Walking on water is the test set by Jesus of Peter’s faith and trust. At least Peter tried.
Perhaps this man is waiting for Charon the ferryman to take him across to Hades? The rings might be used to chain reluctant passengers but this man is not tied, he will not run.
You can read your own story from this picture. I choose to see a man on the edge of the unknown, aware of both beauty and danger but trusting the beauty more. A man taking a moment to think back over his life before continuing on the road forward, with Van Morrison, Into the Mystic.
