Marjory Stoneman Douglas Biscayne Nature Center Gallery Show - November 10th 2-5PM

This afternoon I picked up the promo cards for my upcoming gallery show at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Biscayne Nature Center. It took one rejected attempt, but Ser-Mar did a nice job. There is a huge difference between these cards and the product offered by Modern Postcard. I don't know what the coating is, but they look almost wet. Very glossy. Tthe show opens on November 10th. Click on the image for more information.

Design District

I have been back and forth to DistrictLab the last few days. The drive from the beach into the Design District is always good for a couple of reasons. 1. It's close and the traffic is almost manageable ... compared to most places in Miami. 2. It involves the Julia Tuttle Causeway, which is as Miami as roads get here. (All it's missing is the cruise ships.) And 3. The closer you get to the Design District, the better the design gets! Between the cement factories, the Target stores and the guys living in vans are murals worth driving out of your way to see. But by far the best is the easiest to find. Right where Biscayne goes under 195, a man and a woman stand in the sun. Their shadows against the wall make it seem like they are standing in the grass, and his hands and expression might be apologizing or might be imploring. But it is her hips that turn my head ... every single time I drive by. Don't tell Lara, but it might be love!

Sloooow

When the assignments slow down and then stop, there is really only one thing to do. Marketing. I have spent many hours in front of the computer designing a new promo card. The results went into the mail yesterday. It is a little anti-climatic to spend a week looking at images and fonts, another week matching editors and addresses, and a weekend labeling and stamping to then simply hand 500 cards to the post office. But that's the drill. The best that can be hoped for is that the card finds a home on a photo editors wall or in a file, but more likely the card gets one glance before landing in the trash. Such is the life of a promo card.


I really like the design part of the process. When I put these two images together ... Dave in his Kayak and Lara at the university pool ... I felt a relation between them. Motion, expression, composition and color were elements that drew me to these images. That was two weeks ago. Now I think that I might have had one or two specific magazines in my head when I chose the photographs. My goal with these cards is to convince any editor that water and underwater offers a fresh look for any magazine. I'm just not sure that these two images suggest that idea. But the good thing about a marketing campaign is that I have another shot at it in two months.


Something else that I noticed in this process. I do not always immediately recognize THE shot in a roll of film. This image of David on the Calchec River didn't even make the blog when I first wrote about the trip. Three months later, it is one of my favourite images.