This one presents something of a quandary. Last summer, as the 0-2 people reading this blog probably know, I attempted to sell some pictures at the Shoreline Arts Festival. I did not do very well (I came nowhere near making back costs), but one interesting pattern emerged: This image outsold my other images by far - I made about as much money from this as all my other sales combined. I was surprised. Obviously, I considered this image worthy of sale, but I did not consider it my best prior to the Festival and thus did not expect it to outsell all the others.
I guess what got me is that there wasn't much to the image, either compositionally or in its production. I looked out the window one day, noticed that there were some dandelions gone to seed outside and there wasn't much of a breeze, so I grabbed my camera and started shooting. I didn't do anything fancy; I don't think I even used a tripod in this case. There also aren't that many elements to the composition - just the basic pattern of the dandelion seeds. That's all.
And maybe that's the point. Perhaps the best nature pictures are the ones really obvious in their subject matter and simple in their composition. At least, those were the ones towards which Festival-goers gravitated. Any thoughts? I will speak more to this theme when I feature other pictures that sold well at the Festival.
Incidentally, this is also an exception to the rule I mentioned earlier - that I like to take close-ups on sunny days. On this occasion, the sunshine was filtered, enabling a manageable shutter speed; moreover, as I mentioned, there was practically no breeze.
And maybe that's the point. Perhaps the best nature pictures are the ones really obvious in their subject matter and simple in their composition. At least, those were the ones towards which Festival-goers gravitated. Any thoughts? I will speak more to this theme when I feature other pictures that sold well at the Festival.
Incidentally, this is also an exception to the rule I mentioned earlier - that I like to take close-ups on sunny days. On this occasion, the sunshine was filtered, enabling a manageable shutter speed; moreover, as I mentioned, there was practically no breeze.
2 comments:
That's interesting that this picture sold as much as the others combined. My first thought about this would be... that this picture kind of invites the viewer into another world- that in getting SO close to the dandelion head, with a depth of field SO narrow that it almost obscures the entire thing into an abstraction, it kind of turns the dandelion head into an etherial world all its own, with a few points in focus, the rest out-of-focus, almost distant-looking, like faraway horizons on a planet.
The best pictures always seem to have a story, or a direction- others i would pick out of yours that have this element too are the one of the out-of-focus sun through the fence, and the grey grassy footpath below a vibrant, chilly sunrise. These pictures seem to be going somewhere, or at least hinting about some sort of context/subtext.
Thanks for the comment! I think that's really true; it kind turns the flower into a dream-world. Especially, I think, since a dandelion head is such a common and mundane thing, and to have it look so otherworldly and abstract in a picture is striking.
That's one thing I've been trying to think about - what makes a picture not just be pretty or different, but tell a story. And most of my sellers were ones with subtexts like you mentioned. Good thoughts. Maybe later I'll do a post showing the handful of pictures that people either bought or almost bought and see how that trait plays out.
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