Happy Thanksgiving!  An abundance of food and wine delayed the Thursday night links, but here they are!

• I've heard rumors that the new Canon EOS 5D Mark II will start to filter into stores soon.  I'm really excited to see the creative things artists will do with the awesome HD video this camera can capture.
  

• AP photographer Jerome Delay took this heart-wrenching photo of two children looking for relatives in Kiwanja, Congo. He was inspired to try to reunite the family after receiving a flood of emails from strangers asking how they could help.
• While on an adventure trip in Pakistan last year, my father-in-law sent us a postcard featuring what he called "jingle trucks."  They really are a sight to behold, and I recently found an article about them on Web Urbanist.
• Wow, crazy!  I just learned I can do even more with my Flickr account.  After losing some valued pictures due to hard drive failures and the like, I have been much more religious about uploading full-quality photos to Flickr.  Positive side effects: I got some very pretty business cards from Moo, we'll be ordering our Christmas cards using Flickr, and while I'll always be partial to handmade artist books I may take Blurb for a spin.
  

Today I participated in a press conference for the public launch of the Baker Artist Awards. Thanks to my copious blogging about the Baker Awards, the executive director of the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance invited me to say a few words on a live webcast. I had a great time despite going against my typically introverted character and putting a minor kink in the trainings I was doing for new VISTAs at the office.

Overall, I feel like I was given a great opportunity to be part of this process. Rather than writing about it at length, though, I will just make sure to post a link and a few more words when the recorded version of the press conference comes online.

In other news, I tried out a few new ideas over the weekend. I have often thought about but never tried to represent my exceedingly poor vision. Continuing with my current work, I took several images of the scene I see when I wake up in the morning.  Unfortunately, I don't think this one came out quite blurry enough...

[The upstairs railing, as seen through the bedroom door when I wake up in the morning.]

Combining my past work around lights at night with my current domesticity images, I finally got around to capturing an image that catches my eye every time I sit in our reading room at night. I may eventually go back and retake it from the couch with a longer zoom lens to represent my vantage point a little more authentically.

[Streetlight outside second floor window, looking into the back alley.]

This Thursday's links include...

• Did you know the National Museum of Women in the Arts is free every first Sunday of the month?  That means I could even splurge on a $14 Amtrak ticket rather than driving.  There really is no excuse not to go.
• Speaking of DC, it's too bad we can't combine Free Community Day at the NMOWA with American University's Mid-Atlantic MFA Invitational.  Oh well.
• I recently stumbled upon photographer Elinor Carucci and her "Crisis" series.  These domestic images are very intimate, almost to the point of making me feel slightly uncomfortable and voyeuristic.  It's interesting to see images so different from my own, yet still unfolding domestic life in pictures.
• The Magenta Foundation has posted a call for entries in search of emerging photographers age 34 and under.  I'm a little iffy about the $50 application fee, but then again, maybe that narrows the pool of competition.  Who knows? 
  

A couple weeks ago I announced my entry into the Baker Artist Awards. Since then I have been mystified and impressed by the nomination and voting process. More than any other juried competition I've seen, the Baker Awards are public, interactive, and multi-faceted.

For starters, most competitions are very anonymous: you send in your work, hoping it fits with what the jurors are looking for, and find out later what other pieces entered the fray with you. The Bakers are very public from beginning to end. At any given time, I can go online and interact with the competition.

In fact, this sort of interaction feeds the process. Sure, the big prize comes from the jury, but the pool of images they consider comes from the top vote-getters. The Baltimore's Choice Award is chosen entirely by voters. As stated on the Baker site, "the process is designed to open the nominations to the broadest possible community participation using the Web."

Interestingly, the site does not reveal how many votes you have gotten. It also doesn't give any hints on the “hidden goals” set by the foundation: benchmark achievements such as viewing ten nominations or promoting your own nomination that give you more voting power on the site.

Overall, I hope this model serves as an inspiration to other art competitions nationwide. Our generation is all about accessibility via the Internet, and it's encouraging to see this sensibility making its way into the competitive art world. Curated exhibitions within the site will add another layer of fun as local cultural figures choose their favorite art works from the nomination pool.

Whether or not they give me any money, recognition, or added traffic to my site, the Baker Awards are fun. How many competitions have I entered where I could say that?

As seen this week:

• Does a new hybrid camcorder/DSLR signal a shift in the digital media world?
• An engineering professor at Penn State University has used lots of photo trickery to capture usually-invisible air currents.  The practical application?  Studying air movement in human coughs to understand more fully how diseases spread.
  
• More abandoned stuff caught my eye this week.  This time it's amusement parks.
• The Internet's role in this presidential election was unprecedented, and the more I read about it, the more it astounds me.  Did you know a search for "Obama victory" now yields over 12,000 results on Flickr?
  

Today the deadline passed for the Towson ARTS Collective “Travel Exhibit: Where have you been?” Within the week I have nominated myself for the Baker Artist Awards and submitted more creative non-fiction to the Urbanite. I marked the travel exhibit deadline on my calendar and set a pop-up window to remind me two weeks in advance. I narrowed down my travel photographs to four favorites.

On Thursday, with application in hand, I decided not to send my work in. Suddenly the idea planted itself in my mind that these were just travel snapshots, and it was just coincidence that they had been taken by a photographer with a nice camera. Sure, they looked great, but that didn't make them gallery-worthy. And could I write a convincing artist statement to accompany them?

At the time, my decision seemed informed and practical. After all, if I send my work for an exhibition in the future, did I want to be remembered as that woman who sent in her honeymoon snapshots for the travel exhibit? It was only prudent to hold work that wasn't intellectually up to par.

I could have predicted the regret I'm feeling now. How often I forget, I usually have nothing to lose by applying to something. My travel pictures may or may not be worthy of hanging in a gallery, but how will I know if I don't offer them up for consideration? There's no use mourning an opportunity come and gone, really, but I do need to remember this experience for next time.

Sometimes it just gets difficult to keep marketing my work and putting it out there because it demands a certain level of egotism, self-assuredness, and determination that these images warrant the world's attention. I heard it on my first day of Introduction to Photography back in the day, and it's true: everyone wants to be a photographer, and sometimes it seems like anyone's success is more or less by chance.

I think it's important to touch on these feelings from time to time, however briefly. I'm not at a point in my life where I experience a whole lot of self-doubt, but it happens to all creative people from time to time. We need to acknowledge it and move on, knowing not every submission can be perfect but at least we're getting feedback and getting our name heard. Art isn't a perfect display, it's communication. It's taking an image and preserving it just as you saw it, making it special. And there's certainly no reason to hide your work because you don't think it's “good” enough.

As seen this week:

• Found a new addition to my RSS reader this week: Web Urbanist.  It may end up being too trendy and hip for me, but for now I'm thoroughly enjoying both the subject matter and the writing style.
• Incidentally, Web Urbanist recently put up some classic, texture rich color photos of abandoned hotels, churches, and hospitals.  Who isn't a sucker for photographs like these?  They reminded me of a photo book I absolutely fell in love with sometime in spring 2007: Stephen Wilkes' Ellis Island: Ghosts of Freedom.  I just wish I had the extra cash to buy this book instead of just looking at the whole thing over the course of an hour in the Barnes & Noble.
• 1000 Words Photography just featured some interesting work by Pawel Jaszczuk.  I thought it was some sort of commentary on the the quasi-homeless drunks that inhabit our subways.  Then I thought to myself, "that guy is wearing a pretty nice suit," and read the description.  Salaryman is actually about white-collar Japanese workers, among whom heavy drinking is "naturally accepted" as a "compulsory catharsis" to escape from their high-stress jobs.  Apparently these scenes are more the rule than the exception.
• Maxim photo editor Kelly Stuart was riding the NYC subway at around 12:30 a.m. on election night when a group of people unfurled a giant American flag in the subway car and everyone started singing the national anthem.  How often do you see that kind of patriotism while using public transportation?  I don't care who you voted for, that's really nice.
  

NOT to downplay the real, important election going on right now, I have finally cleared the hurdle of uploading three 10-image portfolios along with artist statements to nominate myself for the Baker Artist Awards.  In addition to boasting a significant cash prize for the winner, these awards celebrate art in Baltimore and engage local artists in a fun, competitive process.

Check out my nomination page, vote, and (if you live in the Baltimore metro area) perhaps even enter your own work in the running!

As the initial momentum settles from my current work around home and the domestic, I have a little breathing room to flip through the pages of my journal and analyze the kernels of ideas written there. Now is a good time to take inventory and gather ideas on how I actually intended to present these images.

From the beginning, I wanted to make these pictures as much about words as pretty photos. So far, the following ideas look good to me:

• Combining journal writings with images in a diptych fashion, using high-quality scans of handwritten work.

• Somehow creating a zine to accompany the photos, an interesting revival of an art form from my teenage years. I am yet undecided whether this would be available as a take-home, by mail, or some other way, but the zine would follow viewers home and become part of their domestic landscape.

• Creating postcards from the images and asking people to mail them to me with on-topic musings. I'd like to see the postcards strung up or otherwise inviting interaction from readers/viewers. This is maybe the toughest idea to connect to the base “meaning” of the work.

Regardless of viewer interaction, these images demand a clean, simple, aesthetically pleasing presentation. Unlike any of my past work, I am celebrating (elevating?) the everyday, taking the small details and making them sacred. At face value a clean, traditional presentation implies images of a very photo-worthy subject.

How photo-worthy is my bedroom lamp? Dust clinging to the edge of an old box? Who would put these things in a gallery? At the root, I think this question connects back to the idea of incorporating journaling or postcard musings. What do these pictures show us? Do they reveal different meanings to different viewers based on context? Why are we looking at these images in the first place?

Ah, now that I'm asking these questions I feel like I'm back in art school again.