Bedrock

Got out of bed a little late this morning but quickly made up for it – first job was to wire one of my new custom home control timers into the hot tub and doing a little software update to get it all working smoothly,

after which, Maureen and I did a joint job working on photos for the Altiplano Camera Club stand at tonight’s Galera festival.

As most of the many thousands of photos I’ve created over the years and put up on Flickr are edited for HD screen use, I had to get a little creative to get them to fit into standard photo frames (which typically still use a format not seen on screens other than apple in many years). On top of that, the dynamics of my Canon photo-printer are very different to a typical screen.

Meanwhile Maureen was practicing her skills with a knife to actually adjust the finished prints to fit into the (glass + wood or card) frames we picked up last week. All of this together took several hours but we were all ready to go help out with the stand by teatime. As it turns out, it seems we could have settled for simpler DIY frames – but what’s done is done.

Of course, being a festival, there was a large turnout in the village and doing a little to help, pre-opening time, we took time out to meet up with friends old and new (way too many to go into detail) at La Posa bar. Blog readers Gary and Jen will no doubt see this and we met up with them briefly in town. We also chatted with several other friends before returning to the club stand for a time to see if more help was needed.

As has always been the case with just about every club with which I’ve been involved during my 50+ years of meddling in photography, electronics and of course business, the bulk of the work is always done by a very small number of people and it seemed to me in this instance that the actual purpose of having a stand had been left a little vague, the result being that most visitors seemed unsure as to whether the club were merely showing off our work or were actually selling photos on behalf of members, the result being that by the time Maureen and I left (I wasn’t in charge of transport) there was (to my knowledge) one definite sale and also one of my works was apparently sold but the person had yet to pay for it.

Next year (only if it is wanted and I’m feeling up to it) I’ll bring some of my commercial background to bear to ensure the public (Spanish and otherwise) are left in no doubt as to why we are there, whatever that reason might be at the time. One obvious route to sales success involves raising the perceived value of goods by offering premium pricing at the start of an event then discounting as time rolls on. Should the club decide that it is more important to merely show off our collective skills then that’s fine too.

My own personal view is that items for sale should ALWAYS be clearly marked with pricing. I’d thought about suggesting marking photos with “Se Vende” and “For Sale” (I tend keep my interference to a minimum as I’m not 100% permanent resident in Spain despite owning a home here for more than a decade) but while walking around the festival, I had the general commercial clarity or lack of it (of the club stand) brought to my attention quite clearly by locals. Despite all that, club officials Lynn Hadfield and her husband did a cracking job of manning the Altiplano Camera Club stand throughout the night, work I’m sure everyone involved appreciates.

Below are a couple of the photos I took to the festival – the first has been processed (turned into a cartoon by a sophisticated tech toy I sometimes use when the weather is rubbish) and depicts part of Alhambra in Granada here in Spain. Shown here without the frames.

The second photo was taken late in the evening at local lake Negratin in steaming hot weather as Maureen and I returned from a road trip some time ago with our friends Karin and Dave – the local Mafia (in-joke).

Finally another of my photos (the original was in a decent glass + wood frame for tonight’s event) – this one taken at the “top of the Rock” during a recent trip to Gibraltar. The extremely bored macaque was priceless – a great memory.

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