Plus: The 10 Commandments for successfully shooting City Market
Also, how Prince Valiant’s graphic art layout can help tell your story
Congratulations, San Miguel Facebookeers! You are creating a new photography genre — City Market Art. Your orgasmic uploading of scores of images from the newly opened high-end supermarket “experience” has been a visual feast worthy of the artfully displayed departments of bread, fish, wine, vegetables, chocolates, and meats.
This is commercial exhibitionism at its finest.
Because you are all so good — and prolific — I am proud to announce the first-ever open invitational online gallery of the year’s best City Market images. I will create a gallery page for your very best images and keep posting new ones through the end of the year.
By which time we should all feel we’ve fairly well exhausted the subject …
Don’t let your best images languish on a single Facebook post, only to disappear in the relentless and voracious feed cycle. Let me offer you a slice of immortality!
Send images to robertj.hawkins2012@gmail.com — and be sure to include your name (for credit) and a little something about each image. Sorry, this is all for the glory. There is no compensation, honorarium, prizes, or lecture chairs to be gained. The images remain yours and yours alone. I promise to put your name in bold face type.
They will be lovingly posted and curated in the order in which they arrive, on a timely basis.
Be selective. Send your favorites. Volume is not art. And I am only one guy. Send a few at a time, or only the one you really really like!
Be creative. Edit. Photoshop. Play with images. Create compositions. Express yourself through your images. Be irreverent. Be ironic. Be playful. Make a statement. Have some fun. Get serious. Make art. Make commerce.
Maybe there will be artistic or psycho-sociological revelations to be had by the end of the year. Who knows until we try, eh?
City Market Photo Galleria will open when enough images arrive. It will only take a few to launch
Meanwhile …
The 10 Commandments — urgent suggestions, mostly — for getting the best out of your City Market photo shoot.
Pro-tips for the several thousand San Miguelians photographing the new City Market with your cell phones and posting on Facebook:
1. Occasionally incorporate foreground objects for perspective.
2. Compose your picture within the frame before you shoot. Crop before you publish.
3. Create a composition that tells a story: Isolate your subject — say, the wine cellar, or the chocolatier, or the fish monger’s. Then compose three shots — a closeup (detail), a middle-ground, and a panoramic. (Think of the “Prince Valiant” Sunday comics spread. See some examples at the bottom of the page.).
4. Vary the perspective — sometimes you need to get down on one knee or raise the camera above your head, or get your nose into that school of sea bass swimming in a bed of ice. Don’t always shoot straight down into the cold shrimp.
5. Look for interesting patterns, artful combinations, playful images. City Market begs you to be ironic.
6. Volume is information but it is not art.
7. It is not all food porn, but it doesn’t hurt to “think sexy” when you shoot. City Market is commercial exhibitionism at its best. Roll with it.
8. Your cell phone has amazing photo editing capabilities. Yes, yours. Sit down and order a coffee and play with your pictures before posting.
9. Put people into your images. So far, most images have looked like the store is a lovely sexy empty mausoleum.
10. Keep those photos coming!
And here’s some old Prince Valiant Sunday comics that I promise. Harold Foster was famous for using the three visual elements — closeup/detail, middle ground, and panoramic — to tell a whole story in one page. Newspaper photographers have used that same technique for decades.
