I really need to blog more, or faster. Before I could get a post up about my second day of vacation, I find that I need to take an “Interlude” here to tell you about last week’s ArtHop™!

So far, every juried exhibition I’ve done has been at the Sorensen Studio in Fresno. Theirs was the first studio I ever submitted prints to for a juried exhibition, and I’ve continued to periodically enter their shows, and win.

However, I wanted to know – for myself – that I could win elsewhere. (That’s the thing about us artistic types, I’m told – and I know it’s true of me – we sometimes doubt ourselves, and think we just “got lucky” when we win something.) Let’s face it: there’s a certain amount of subjectivity that goes into judging a work of art, and maybe I’m just lucky that I’m producing stuff they like at the Sorensen.

I knew that the Fresno Arts Council had a juried exhibition concerning a subject I’ve photographed frequently: agriculture. But last year their show rules did not permit manipulated works. I considered my works manipulated (particularly this one). Even HDR is, to me, manipulated because there is a judgment call about how tones are mapped.

This year, the rules changed, and the Fresno Arts Council created a category for manipulated photographic images. They called it, as I recall, “interpretive.”

And so I submitted three pieces to the show.

Ironically, whoever makes the decisions decided that the HDR images I submitted were not interpretive, but fit into their “Photography-Documentary” category.

That’s fine with me.

The upshot? Last Thursday, being the first Thursday of the month, both the Sorensen and the Fresno Arts Council announced the winners of their respective juried exhibitions.

Over at Fresno City Hall, where the Fresno Arts Council “Arts Alive in Agriculture” is being exhibited through the entire month of May, this happened:

And this:

And then over at the Sorensen Studios, this happened:

That’s right: you might say I cleaned up. First and second place wins in the category of “Photography-Documentary” in the Fresno Arts Council “Arts Alive in Agriculture” show, and first place win in the “Landscapes” category in the Sorensen Studio 6th Annual Black & White Show.

You can view all my awards here.

For information on how to purchase prints, you can either contact me directly, or visit Rolff’s Gallery in the Bullard Pavillion at Bullard & West in Fresno, California. You can also purchase any of my images direct-printed on t-shirts. For more information on that, contact me directly.

Here are the winning images, to give you a better idea of what they look like: