Associate with the AIPP
I've been working hard behind the scenes this year, entering awards and working on my photography to get better and better at it. If there is an ambitious gene, I apparently got it..
I entered the AIPP State Awards in June and received a Silver Award for one of my prints and a Silver Distinction for another, and a whole bunch of 79's. For those of you wondering 79's are very high professional practise, but frustratingly just under award standard so it's a case of 'close, but not quite'... anyway the further along I get into entering the awards, the more my goal posts change. Initially I just wanted to win an award. Then I wanted to be a finalist in ACT. Then I wanted to win a category in ACT. I did both those things. Then I wanted to win awards for a different category... and this year, I wanted to enter my prints at the National Level and achieve my Associate (which you do by getting a certain number of points/awards when you enter nationally)...
With my State results I needed to do a fair bit of work to get my prints up to above award standard for nationals, which are notoriously harder (well in my experience anyway). I cared the most about my portraits. This first one I have been working on since January. It took me 6 attempts at shooting to get it to the level I needed it. The model in this image is my daughter, which made things even more difficult. Every shot was a process in bargaining and she let me have maybe 5 minutes before she got sick of it. Blowing a fan on her was okay in January but by May was anything but fun... Another big component of this image was the backdrop. I wanted to create the look of posters being re postered over and peeled off (climate change is not a new issue) and also add the school component (referring to the school strikes initiated by Greta Thunberg) by using blackboard paint. Photoshopping is not my thing; I do it to the level I need it to improve my images, but I didn't want to shop everything in. So what you see here is what I created physically with posters, paint and a whole lot of paper mâché glue...
This scored Silver at State and I reworked it and it scored Silver at Nationals.
The following image I was also really emotionally invested in . I did a photoshoot with Hanna in May. I was really happy with the results and excited to have images that challenged what people thought about disability. I entered the top image of Hanna leaning back in her wheel chair. Unfortunately at the ACT awards, the judges didn't get my point, and the message got lost in translation. They didn't get what I was trying to say. I could have shot it better, and no one got from the image the story I knew about my subject. I am incredibly thankful for the 79 I got at state, because it made me realise I had nothing to lose. As reshooting was out of the question, I needed to rework what I had, to tell the story I was trying to tell. I would write it all down, but if you look closely enough, the detail should be in the image... I loved playing with the notion of Facebook as a "portrait" because it is how we exist to so many.
My gamble paid off. This received a Silver Distinction at Nationals.
As a side note, I had to re print this 3 times to get the skin tone right; and it was an incredibly difficult image to create; as I made it with 72 screen shots, then had to print that image, photograph it and put in all the layers again...
The final image is a documentary image, which got a Silver Distinction at State and Silver at Nationals. I love it, as it's the start of a trip I took with my kids last year. It just so happens to be shot on an iPhone; proving the best camera is the one you have on you...
