This isn’t supposed to happen.
I’m not supposed to have second-thoughts or third-thoughts about my pictures. If I think my photos are winners, then I put them in competition and see how they do. I’ll turn the photos into Dream Windows and sell them for charity. I’ll promote the becheebers out of them in this blog. Best photos go to the front of the line. Not-so-best photos barely get scanned and uploaded.
And then came this picture, this unassuming photograph I took a while back of a telephone pole along a Cohoes thoroughfare. Originally it was a 6×6 image shot with my Kowa Super 66, a camera I don’t own any more. Originally it was taken with Svema film – Svema 32, a film so slow you could clock its optimal shutter speed with a sundial. I’ve had miserable luck with the Kowa, and Svema film didn’t earn its nickname “wonky” because I thought it was made by Oompa-Loompas.
I filed this picture away and promptly forgot about it. As far as I was concerned, it was probably the only time the Kowa and the Svema worked together. Sino-Soviet relations being what they were back in the day and all…
And then, as I went through my archives one wet, chilly day, I saw the picture. And this time, I viewed it with fresh eyes. It was okay in its original square iteration. But I don’t submit “okay” photos to competitions.
Still, something about this picture caught my attention and held on like a vise-grip. The photo was a combination of despair and anger, buttressed against balance and rigidity. It used the 20-year-old expired Ukrainian film formulation to build stormy textures in the sky, while reducing the telephone pole and cables to black, geometric angular silhouettes.
I carefully cropped the picture, so that the power and telephone cables either intersected at the borders, or the lines went straight into the photo corners. Maybe… just maybe…
A symmetrical black border on the photo… and I came up with this.
I gave it the name “Power and Light à la Свема” based on its subject and its capture. Yes it’s Svema film, but it’s actually Свема film that was manufactured in Shostka, Ukraine. Probably down the street from the shtetl of Fievel Mousekewitz and his family.
Yes it’s a telephone pole with some power wires attached to it. Yes it’s angry and fierce and stalwart, all at the same time. I studied the picture more and more. And more. And the more I examined it…
The more I wanted to enter it in competition. Almost as if I had completely forgotten this photo’s existence… and wanted to make up for lost time.
I still have some time before I have to fill out entry forms and applications. But I’m still on the fence with this one.
So I ask you, my blog readers, your thoughts. Should I enter “Power and Light à la Свема” in competition? If so, why? If not, why not?
I’m trusting your judgment on this, and I want your opinions.
Chuck The Writer 
It certainly is a dramatic picture and worth consideration. It is especially interesting with the backstory of the outdated Ukrainian film and the camera you don’t own anymore. I never got beyond the ranks of “enthusiastic amateur” in photography, but I remember reading in a photography book a long time ago that some of the best pictures are taken by accident. In my opinion, I’d enter it.
LikeLike
I think you need to keep in mind the context in which judges evaluate photos in competitions. The photo will be placed on a stand, the judges will look at it for maybe 5-10 seconds, and give it a score. The only way they’ll be looking at it for longer is if the score ties for one of the top positions, in which case it will be evaluated side by side with one or more others.
The judges have no back story. They don’t know what kind of film you used, or even if it’s a film shot at all (unless you enter it in a film specific division). They could just as easily interpret the grainy feel from the film as digital noise from a high ISO setting. You need to ask yourself whether this image alone, with no other context, is enough to immediately grab three judges’ attention and tell enough of a story to make it stand out from the other entries.
I like what you did with the framing of the shot and it’s a great story, but without the background info I’m not overly optimistic about its prospects for competition. You’ve posted other shots this year that I think are stronger.
LikeLike
I agree with what Bob said. It is a great story, and because of that I can appreciate the picture. But the judges are walking by the photos, and yours is going to be placed next to a babbling brook in the snow and a horse and kid in a field of wildflowers, and it will just be a black and white telephone pole to them.
LikeLike