Friday, September 19, 2008

Humble Pie

Back in August I thought I might like to enter a few of my photos in our fair, which was coming up soon. I got online to check the closing dates and rules. There were many different categories and the rules state one person can enter five photos, with no more than two in each category.

When I started looking at my pictures to decide which ones I should enter I was unpleasantly surprised. I liked most of them but they just didn't seem to have that "wow!" factor. Oh well, I thought. The entry fee was only $2.00 per photo so it was no big deal.

I finally decided on five pictures, printed them out and carefully mounted them on photo mounting boards as directed in the rules.

The fair opened this week. Today was old folks day senior citizens day and the gates opened at 9 am. Since Carli was off I invited her to come with me to see how my pictures fared. (wink wink)

Some of these I may have already posted at one time on this blog or my Yahoo blog.

The first category I entered was "close-up or scientific", whatever that is. I entered my red dragonfly and the "Death of A Caterpillar".

Then in the "flowers" category I entered the ants on the daisy. I didn't really expect anything from this one.
Now you can put a face to the name. This was the "portrait" category of my neighbor, Dean.

And finally, my personal favorite from the "animals" category, my dog, Clyde.

It's really tough to tell what exactly the judge(s) were looking for. Sad to say, I didn't even get one "honorable mention" sticker. When we were checking out all the other photos (there were tons!) we would point out ones we really liked and wonder why they didn't have any prizes. And then there were some that did have winning stickers that left us wondering what was so interesting about that particular photo. From the comments we heard from the other folks we weren't alone.

It's all subjective I guess. I'll just have to try again next year.

The highlight of the day was when we were walking through the "Collections" exhibits and one man pointed to my baby granddaughter and said, "Now that's a winning entry right there!"

He got that right!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tina,
These are all blue-ribbon worthy in my book, & Gus deserves a Best in Show.

Anonymous said...

Ok, you need to try again! I love your work, I love the ones from your recent trip, loved the one of the tree lined path...
I will email you a website of a dad from our school who has sold work, you will be amazed at how blah his pictures are compared to yours!!
Patti

Anonymous said...

I think your photos are winners! And I definitely think baby girl is the best!
Reminds me of a story of my little sister at the fair once. She was about four and was looking at sock monkeys someone had made at a craft display. A total stranger came up to my parents and asked if he could buy her one. He said he didn't have a child or a grandchild, and he thought she was simply the most beautiful child he had ever seen and he wanted to do something for her. That was like twenty years ago. I know you always have to be suspicious of people and such, but I often think of this instance as a person simply out of the goodness of their heart doing something for a stranger. They never saw the man again but she still has the sock monkey!
I think your photos rock. Anything like that judging wise is subjective. It's like an art teacher giving a grade, they should always grade on if you did the assignment, not how well etc., because art will always be in the eye of the beholder. You get a blue ribbon in my book!