I want to thank all of you that have participated in this with me and I now view as friends. I’m not saying goodbye forever as I hope to stay in touch with all of you at some point along the way. And don’t forget that you have an open invitation for the a $3.00 Greg Boyer Tour of the Eastern Sierra if you ever decide to come this way. Check back now and then for discount coupons….

In the coming months as time allows I will be redoing this site. It will be a portfolio/gallery site only. It will be to back up my sales on the art fair circuit and a good way for new clients to see my new work as it becomes available.

So, I wish each and every one of you great success and happiness in your lives. Wow…this is harder than I thought it would be…..Hope to see you.

Best Regards,

Greg……

Not the Valley of the Shadow of Death, but close, the Sacramento Valley. With the fog swirling around and the night lights of the Sacramento area ablaze, this reminded me of Dante’s Inferno. This is an image that I took from the balcony of my sister and her husbands balcony. They get some amazing sunsets and night scenes.

Well, I’m back home and starting to get ready for the next art fair, Presidents Day. I’ll then have a break until May when I will be at it again. So I’m hoping that I can finish up on some tips that I have in mind in the near future. So much to do, so little time.

What’s new out there? Well here is a sneak peek of Photoshop CS6 at AppleInsider. Scroll down to the video on “Blur Removal” this new function is simply mind blowing. If you do a search on YouTube you will find more of the new functions. A lot of them are foreign language, but you can get the drift of whats coming. Hurry up May 12th(release date).

1.This is an old wood working trick. I had several matted prints that had very noticeable dings on the faces of the mats. Normally I would just cut a new mat, but these were 8-ply and really expensive and really hard to cut. What I remembered was that in wood working if you take a small amount of water and apply it to the dented area and then used a steam iron and clean soft cloth you could raise the dent as long as the fibers are not broken. So I took a Q-tip, wet it and dabbed distilled water on the dented areas and let it soak in. I then took my steam iron, set to the highest temperature, and proceeded to apply steam heat through a clean soft white towel. After a few minutes the dents were gone. I don’t know how often you get dings in your mats, but the next time you can try this solution.

2. For white mats a white gum rubber eraser will remove most finger prints and accidental dirt spots.

3. This is for Photoshop. While working on an image I just couldn’t get the colors toned down to what I wanted. They were just too punchy and unrealistic. I tried all the standard methods, desaturation, selective color, curves. Nothing gave me what I wanted. I was really frustrated and just groping around trying different things. What I found completely by accident follows:

Create a new layer at the top of the stack and fill with white. Change the blend mode to “color”. You’ll be really surprised at what happens. You will have a pretty decent grayscale image. Go figure. Now here is where it gets really interesting. When you set the opacity to 20% you will have toned down your colors substantially. Use the opacity slider to adjust the colors to your liking.

I haven’t figured out how this works yet, but I’m going to make an action for it because it is really useful. Let me know if you are interested in the action and I will post it. I hope to have a tip on using the threshold function for masking soon.

Best to all.

Where to start, I guess with the last Art Festival? The latest was actually two separate functions, one that went from December 21st through the 24th, and the second that went from the 26th through to January 1st. All in all, things went pretty smoothly, except for my car breaking down and having to do a major move of my display (five hours of work) because the organizer of the show forgot that he had promised part of my area to another artist.

When I decided to participate in the first art show I only had enough frames for six pieces and did not have the funds to frame all the pieces that I wanted to exhibit. I decided to hang all the pieces matted, my thoughts on this were that most people would want to choose their own style of frame and it would keep my prices at a more reasonable level. I had also read an article some time back by a well established art photographer that he was going to display his prints under glass, with no matting or mounting. I thought this was an interesting idea.

It turned into a disaster. First, the methods of hanging matted prints, I decided on Gallery Clips, cause all sorts of problems with large prints, mine are 24″ x 32″ mat size, from bowing, to damaging the edges where the clips are in contact with the mat. On top of that the exposed prints are the targets of small children and really stupid adults that think it is alright to rub their hands all over the prints.

Second, I know that not having the prints framed cost me several sales of the larger pieces. The people said they loved the work but didn’t want the hassle or the extra cost of getting them framed. The extra cost being that getting the work done in a frame shop is really expensive as compared to the frames most artist supply.

Dealing with people, in other words, selling your work. This is a really tough subject. Do you just sit back and let the people gaze at your work and hope for the best, or do you come on like a used car salesman? You have to find a happy medium. You will find by observing when someone is interested enough to be approachable and when they are just looking and not really interested. Usually a question like “Do you have any questions about  this image?” or you can say ” that is an image that is from——.” These will break the ice and give you a good sense of what the person is interested in. The most successful people at these art shows were not necessarily the best artists. They were really good at selling their work.

Be honest about your work. There was a young photographer exhibiting at the show and he swore that he didn’t do anything digitally to his images. The colors gave him away. Several people including the show organizer were really put off by this. When asked if I did anything to make my images look the way they do I tell them that all my work is digital and that I work very hard to make my images “not look like a photograph.” and would explain what I do to get that look. Everyone that I talked to appreciated my honesty. What was really interesting is that 9 out 10 people asked me how I painted all the detail into my paintings. They were shocked when I explained that they were photographs.

Pricing your images is a tough one. I am of the philosophy that you should price your work at the upper end, it’s a lot easier to negotiate down than up, and pricing too low seems to say that you don’t value your work. On the other hand you can’t just take a poor piece of art and throw on a high price, that doesn’t work either. The same young photographer that didn’t do anything digital to his work, had all his pieces priced with two prices, one, a regular price and the second a show price. The show price being about half the regular price. The only problem was his regular price was so out of line with the quality of his work that people saw this as a cheap “come on”. The other photographer that was exhibiting is a very well established and well known photographer. Almost all of his work is large format, well printed and framed. His prices reflected the quality of his work, starting around $500.00 and going up to $2500.00. He sold several framed prints in the $1500-2000 range and quite a few in the $500-800 range. The more expensive pieces were quite large, I guess around 30″ x 40″.

You are probably wondering how my sales were. Not very good. I just barely covered my costs, which is much better than losing money. If I factored in my time it would have been a disaster. There were six exhibitors there that have been doing this show for years, in fact that is how they make their living, and all of them said the same thing. That is that you never know how a show will go. Sometimes you won’t sell anything and the next time you will sell everything. You just have to be able to ride out the dry runs.

So as it stands now, the first show was very good for me, the second  and third shows were just OK. Averaging things out and I’m just a little bit ahead of the game so far. I have signed up for the upcoming Presidents Day show and the Labor Day shows and will try to get into some in between these. I’ll keep everyone posted.

ps. If anyone is interested in how I built the display panels just let me know and I’ll be glad to share what I have learned.

ps. Thank you all for your good wishes. 2012 is going to be awesome.

So that is my excuse for the slow responses to your comments as of late. It’s not that I don’t appreciate them, just got behind. I’ll do better….I promise.

What an experience. From start to finish if something could go wrong it would go wrong. What is indelibly etched into my psyche is that you should test every aspect of your display, down to the smallest detail, before you leave home.

All in all, it was a great experience. From building the display panels, to figuring out a support system, to actually setting up at the art festival. I received very good response to my work and had very good sales, even though the regulars said that they couldn’t remember a festival that was this slow.

I was invited back for the Christmas art festival and will start working on getting ready tomorrow. I found that I could have used a lot more inventory. So in the next few days I will go into more detail as I am just dog tired from this ordeal….it took over a month to get everything done.

Hope that everyone is well.

I didn’t realize that I haven’t done a thing with this blog in so long. My excuse…..I’ve been really busy getting ready for an upcoming arts festival. I’ve been building the display panels, that has been very interesting, and getting prints ready. This is going to be my first time and I’m hoping that it goes well. Even if it doesn’t, it will be a very good learning experience. After I get done with the preperations I can get back to a more regular schedule here on the blog. I’ve got a few new tips, involving the Threshold Adjustment Layer in Photoshop and some other miscellaneous things that I want to share.

Todays image is of the Pidgeon Pt. Lighthouse at sunset. Got lucky on this one. I usually don’t get sunset images, either I’m late, or I leave too early, or the sun doesn’t set.

I was in a local gallery last week (not Mountain Light) and overheard two women that were browsing through the landscape prints that the gallery owner had done. The first woman said, “Oh, my. These are just beautiful. There are so just so many.” Now here is where it gets really stupid. The second woman states without missing a beat, “I just have to get a camera so I can do these!”. The owner who was waiting on another customer overheard this comment and looked at me in amazement. I just shrugged my shoulders and shook my head. I must say that I was pleased that I bit my tongue and didn’t just explode in a tirade as to what it really took to produce a fine art print.

I guess you can’t really blame her, what with the way cameras and printers are being advertised. Most people think all you have to do is point your cell phone, or point and shoot camera in the general direction of the landscape and you will magically produce a gallery quality 20″ x 30″ print comparable to Ansel Adams.

If you think about it the general public justs doesn’t understand or isn’t willing to invest the time to research most things that are taken for granted. Ask someone where does your drinking water come from and the reply 99% of the time will be “the faucet”. The same with our electrical supply, “out of the wall.”. If most people saw the way their meat was prepared they would be vegetarians.

I wish life were as simple as the advertisers are trying to mislead us into believing.” Buy this thingamajig and you will be an artist!”, “Buy this whatchamacallit and you will be popular and beautiful!”. I know from personal experience that it doesn’t work that way. I just received the latest whatchamacallit and it didn’t work. I’m still getting older and still overweight.

Enough of this. I have added a new link. It is to the site of Stephen Gingold, a photographer in Western Massachusettes. He has some very fine work, you should check it out..