On Aug 18, 2005, at 10:18 AM, Mark Roberts wrote:
The San Francisco organization photoAlliance is hosting their third
annual "Slide Slam!" this Friday evening. I've never been to one
before, thought it might be a giggle.. Details are on this page:
http://www.photoalliance.org/
I'm busily pulling 10 photographs to submit on CD...
Godfrey, I'm interested in hearing how this slide slam thing goes.
Could
you report back afterwards? I'd seriously like to consider organizing
something like this in Pittsburgh so I'd be curious about how the
logistics and organization are set up.
Okay, sorry not to get to this sooner but it's been busy around here.
The PhotoAlliance Slide Slam was a fun event. At 6pm or so they
started registration. $20 per person paid for a BBQ dinner and use of
the facilities at San Francisco Academy of Art. In registration, each
participant delivered their photos to the folks at the table ... 10
slides or 10 JPEG images on a CD.
For the slides, they were loaded into carousel trays with a title
slide with the photographers name and a blackout closing slide. For
the JPEGs, they were loaded into a PowerBook running iPhoto, again a
title slide and a blank slide were added to the 10 photos.
No theme was suggested, no sizing information for the digital images
was provided. People brought a wide variety of work in both slides
and digital images. I put together 10 half-rez (1500 pixels down the
long axis) JPEGs at about Photoshop's #8 quality setting. I drew my
set of 10 from the PAW 2005 People & Portraits gallery work in
progress, so all of mine were B&W renderings.
All that took a bit of time for the crew to set up, while dinner was
going on and general socializing went on. It was fun: met a few
interesting folks, and two of my friends showed up as well. At 8:45,
the group was moved to the auditorium where a digital projector and a
slide projection system were setup. Unfortunately, the high quality
digital projector was out for some reason so they had to make do with
a small portable unit.
The presentation was very very informal: basically, photographers
were invited to speak if they chose to when their slide photo set was
presented, and questions comments were welcomed. Each photo was shown
for 10 seconds in sequence, and 7 judges were taking notes and
informally keeping track of what they felt were outstanding photos.
40 participants' sets of 10 photos were in the agenda, about an hour
and a half viewing time given a few stops here and there.
The work presented was all over the map in content. Only a few
photographers were prepared to speak to their work (I spoke fairly
briefly as to what the project was about, etc). There were a few
places where some music or speaking were sorely needed to help the
display along...
The digital photos displayed reasonably well, considering the lack of
a color managed projection system. Colors were off, my B&Ws' subtle
tonalities were somewhat poorly rendered; what seemed to display best
were color graphically oriented images with strong colors/bold
compositions. But overall they were good and the display ran without
a hitch.
The slides ran next. Speaking objectively, the slide projection
system (which *was* the Art college's high-quality system) was
nowhere near the quality of the portable digital projector: constant
problems with focus, with slide handling, etc. Even the color was
poor by comparison; the difference was quite striking. In my opinion,
the slides would have been much better rendered if they'd been
scanned and displayed as digital images.
When the viewing was done, the judges presented three awards (no, I
didn't get one, but I wasn't expecting to... ;-) and a lot of the
folks hung around a while discussing the work they'd presented.
It was a fine evening, first time I've participated in one of these,
and I learned quite a bit about this organization and the other
participants. My friends who were there with me and I are now quite
interested to do a couple of these events ourself, locally here.
We're thinking to put a little more structure into the event:
- Regardless of whether the originals are film or digital capture,
the photos will be accepted
for display only in digital form.
- Photographers will be given a time period and required to talk
through their presentation,
with manual remote control of the projection equipment.
- Anyone who would like to will be encouraged to have their photos
available for viewing
after the primary presentation, either by display on a laptop or
in prints or whatever.
- All submissions will be required to be in the day before so that we
can all be ready to go
without the long setup period.
- The digital projector will be color managed.
- The number of presenters will be limited to keep the total group
presentation to one hour.
(It seemed to many I spoke to that past the one hour mark,
attention was drifting too much.)
It's a lot of fun, I want to explore this kind of event more.
Godfrey
