Gallery Show in 43 Things

Ok, one of the main things on my To Do List is to get a gallery of my photography together for a display at the local coffee shop. This requires many steps. The first, and hardest, is weeding out the best pictures out of the thousands and thousands I've taken. (Literally, I think I have 10,000 photos on my portable hard drive...)

For this goal, I've finished step one. I managed to pick out 50 or so of my best/favourite photos, and then got that down to 30...20...finally 15, the goal number. So. Step one: DONE!

Step two of this goal is to have the photos printed.

This entails deciding where to print. What size to print. What paper to print on. What finish to choose.

I researched several online place to print, among them Photobucket, DeviantArt, and mPix. I decided to finally go with mPix, as I had gotten several recommendations from friends for the site, and it was the only one to give me a size/price ratio that I wanted. Today, I finally bit the bullet and completed step two! DONE!!

Even tho I had narrowed my photo choices down to 18 several weeks ago, I was hemming and hawing on getting them printed cuz I couldn't decide if I should go for cheaper and sacrifice the size I wanted, or hold out until i found exactly what I wanted. Then I managed to work 24hrs of overtime this week at work, giving me a little extra cash flow, so I decided Now or Never and just did it.

Now step 3 involves framing. I have a friend who does professional framing, and she usually does framing for me at cost, which means she only charges me for materials. Meaning only about $20 per piece. However, with such a large amount of pieces, I am hesitant to ask her, because that's a lot of time involved. I looked in to online frame stores but to get frames with glass and all is crazy expensive. So I've decided to go the cheap way and raid Micheal's. When La and I stopped in there a few weeks ago, all frames were 50% off, but I didn't have a print in hand to see how it would look/fit, and at that point I hadn't decided on what size I was going with. So needless to say I missed that sale. This week it looks like most frames are 40% off which means I could get away with framing for less than $20 a piece, which would be nice since there are going to be 15 pieces.

Step 4 involves securing a time to have the showing. The Arts Council rotates work out of the coffee shop (the closest thing we have to a gallery here....) every month. This month is obviously taken and out of the running. September and December are taken, but I don't know about November. I have a request in to get the next available slot, which may not be until January. It would kind of suck to have to store 15 framed prints until January, but if I have to, I have to! I could always hang them all up in my room/house, lol. We shall see.

So this project is 75% complete!!!