Thursday, April 29, 2010

Out of Area


Our phone not only displays the caller id, but speaks it as well, which truth be told, is somewhat comical, albeit useful in some circumstances. If I'm in the backyard, I can hear who is calling, and know whether or not to run inside. Most of the time if I see or hear, out of area, I know it's a not a call worth running for. For whatever reason, this time I answered quite cheerfully to the out of area call. The young woman's voice on the other end said she was from the "Lakeland Ledger," presumably the local Lakeland newspaper. Because I'd already had a voice mail from the paper with an offer for a special $75 advertising offer, I immediately stated that I'd never done the "Mayfaire" before, thus no one would recognize my name-- an ad would not be useful. Immediately she said she wasn't calling about that, in fact, she was calling to interview me if that was okay. She began by asking if I minded giving my age, to which, of course, I said I didn't mind at all.

After the age question, she asked what kind of photography I did. Now, that was hard to answer. Looking at my website while we talked, she discovered from the home page (thank you Matt!) little bit of my range. She understood my hesitation. Some people would think that I primarily sell photographs of flowers, but after doing a little check on my first three months sales, that is not at all the case. I have my baskets sorted by rough categories--Beach/Landscape in one, Food/Wine, Flowers/Animals, and Funky stuff, which includes all manner of things. Turns out, if you remove Street Art (How Soon is Now?) from the equation, the sales are pretty evenly distributed.

At the outset I thought that having a wide range was a good thing, and I still do, but it has made ordering harder, and harder. What did you expect? That I'd take the easy way? Well, no, you knew I was a silly girl when you began reading this blog. For this show all the prints are supposed to be numbered, however, after dragging everything inside last week, I realized the task was too daunting for me. Maybe I'll start from here on out, but how in the world does one keep track of hundreds of images? Undoubtedly there are folks who can, but Mrs. Camera Crazy is not one of them.

Let's return to the interview, shall we?

One of her questions was, what image am I proud of? Yikes!!! How to answer that? That would be like asking me which of my new chairs I like best. I like them all for different reasons! I stammered that under the orange gallery, I particularly like "Three Faces," which for those of you who don't know what the heck I'm writing about, is a simple photograph of three orange and white daisies taken on Bruce's desk one morning. I think it was one of the first times I had an idea for a still life that really worked. I'd just told Bruce on Sunday evening how I remember being so thrilled when I took it; I not only printed it on my home printer, I took it to the dry cleaners, showing it off to the ladies! First off, we've been going there for years, secondly, they probably thought I was crazy, but that's how excited I was. That was the beginning of the end of only taking photographs while out and about. Increasingly, some of my best selling photos are ones I've shot around the house. Make that, in the garage, the backyard, the sunroom, the bathroom, the kitchen. You get my drift.

From there we covered how long I'd been doing photography, to which I gave my stock answer: "I've always been a photographer, I just used bigger equipment!" Silly, huh? Lots more questions and answers followed, in total we spent about twenty minutes on the phone. I realized after our conversation, I'd better get busy on making sure my website is in good form, although, for me, it's mostly something everyone has to have these days, however little traffic it generates. I've certainly given out the address thousands of times!

I've really no idea if my profile will run in the "Ledger," but it was pretty cool to be asked.

Here's my competition: Show Artists

4 comments:

Lisa Spak said...

Very cool! That collage is beautiful

matt said...

hey mom
you might tell the people running the show's website that the link to your website is not right. they've left out a period after www.
anxious to read your interview. :)

Gail Peck said...

Thank you Matt--I called and made them aware of the error.

Gail Peck said...

Thank you Lisa--I take so many this seemed like a good way to share.

A Week Ago Tuesday