"On with the show..."

Well, the Dirty Show is this weekend, and everyone is getting their nipple jewelry just so and deciding which latex miniskirt will look best in a crowded room. I've picked out a shirt, which for me is a real sartorial undertaking. It's kind of funny how much I've allowed this event to influence my behavior for the past couple months. I spent a lot of time considering what I was going to enter into the show, even to the point of gearing parts of a couple shoots to doing "Dirty Shots" that push the boundaries of what I normally shoot with an eye to entering them in the show. Funny thing is, the two pieces they selected for the show were not done with the show in mind, so I'm sure there's a lesson there.

I selected a number of images to print for sale at the Museum Store at the event, too. A lot of these had not been posted on my blog or portfolio prior to making the prints. I'll confess to not slaving over a hot enlarger in a darkroom to make my prints, but the service I use does a beautiful job with them, and comes highly recommended by a professional art photographer I know. It was really wonderful opening the package with the prints inside -- such a different experience from viewing them on a computer screen or even looking at inkjets. Then came setting aside time to mount and mat the prints for sale, which is more time consuming than it probably should be, although I'm getting a bit faster now. I'll have 30 different prints for sale at the event, about 20 of them never offered before.

I've also been putting off scheduling shoots until "after Dirty" for the most part, except for a few opportunities that couldn't be turned down. Combined with being busy at work, the general non-productive nature of the holidays, and a backlog of editing I'm trying to catch up on, it just feels like I've been in suspended animation for a couple months, waiting for the "Dirty" weekend to come and go, so hopefully things can get back to normal... at least until the next call for entries. Now that I've been through this twice, I'm hoping to take things more in stride next time around.