- Qualifications in LARP photography
A somewhat misleading title. You can’t get qualifications in LARP photography and I’m not about to start my own school proclaiming that you can. (Unless you want to send me a few hundred quid and I’ll print you a certificate out on this fancy paper I have tucked away.)
However you can get some qualifications in photography.
Allow me to insert a brief interlude here. This blog is not interested in the debating the differences between qualifications and awards, or the value/worth of letters awarded by societies based on submitted panels of work. Comments to that effect may well get deleted if they’re not very constructive.
Since I write for an organisation that awards qualifications based on panels of work I’ve been toying for a while if perhaps I should work my way through the process of putting together a panel and submitting to see what happens. It’s not the cheapest side project I could do, but it seems worthwhile.
However the subject then comes up of what exactly I should submit. I’d always thought that I’d like to submit a portfolio of nudes featuring men, but I’ve never quite managed to get that project off the ground and if the truth is told, I’m just not as interested in that as I used to be.
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about if LARP is art. Tied into that are considerations about if photography of LARP can be art. Which I think is also kind of interesting. But then I find all sorts of strange things quite interesting. It struck me that perhaps I should work towards my photographic qualifications by submitting panels of LARP photography (or my ‘funny friends’ as my editor likes to put it).
I am certainly of the opinion that photographs of LARP can be good enough to submit to an organisation as part of a panel of this kind. The entry guidelines are as follows:
We are looking for images that show the applicant is in full control of the medium. The images should show correct camera technique, full control of the lighting and the final production of the finished image. Many images fail at the last hurdle because the final digital file or print quality is poor, showing banding from ink jet prints, blemishes that should have been retouched or poor presentation. Very often colour balance is wrong. We expect to see that the photographer is in control of the subjects portrayed and in the case of people, that they are posed in an attractive manner and good expressions obtained.
A submission of twenty prints is required at 20×16” of a uniform size and flush mounted.
In the case of all other submission your application should be in a singular discipline i.e. landscapes, pictorial, illustrative, commercial etc.
It doesn’t seem too difficult. A panel of twenty images that show correct camera technique, control of lighting and good final production to print.
I can manage that, right?
