We wake up each morning with plans of how that day will unfold. But of course life is no respecter of plans, especially ours. And so it was for me today (Monday).
My plan was to spend this day completing my preparations to send my Dualities portfolio to LensWork magazine. If you're a regular reader this will sound familiar. You might even be shaking your head and saying to yourself, "Hasn't she done that YET?" Well, the answer is no, I haven't. But today I was going to finish printing out the last three images so I'd have a total of 32. Their Submissions Guidelines had mentioned 30-70 as a good number of images to submit. Apparently the editor likes to have lots to choose from. Well, 32 was all I could come up with since the mag only prints B&W, meaning most of my selective color images wouldn't work. Now, please keep in mind that this is a first-rate national publication and my submissions are unsolicited, but you never know. My motto is, aim high!
So I completed the printing and had just laid out all 32 images on the tables in my studio. I wanted to immerse myself in them before tackling the next part of the submissions process--writing a 200-350 word introduction including a description of my creative process, methodology and motivation for creating this body of work. After that would come a 40-100 word biography that focused on my development as a photographer. I also needed to prepare my digital files according to their specifications. Lots to do but I had a totally free day to devote to this. Or so I thought. The reality turned out to be quite different.
A little background to prepare you for what happened next.
On March 9, I'd received an email from a documentary film producer in Los Angeles who had found my "Detroit Neighborhoods" gallery in a Google search. She wanted to know if I had any more photos of a particular part of the city that they might be featuring in an upcoming film. We'd exchanged emails over the past week and she seemed to be coming close to hiring me to take some location shots to help them decide whether or not it would be worth their while to come to Detroit for a mini-production shoot. But as of Saturday she was still waiting to get the go-ahead from her senior producer.
Around noon today--9 a.m. in Los Angeles--my phone rang. It was the producer asking if I had any questions about the email she'd sent me on Sunday detailing the locations she wanted me to shoot and asking that I send her an invoice today at the latest. She'd already told me what they were willing to pay and it had sounded fine to me. But the problem was that I had not received Sunday's email at all. She sent it again while we were on the phone and it still didn't go through. Luckily Ed has a fax machine so I asked her to send me a fax instead. When it arrived my sweet husband drove home to deliver it to me.
The rest of the day was spent searching Mapquest, the online white & yellow pages, and Google to try to find the places she wanted me to shoot. Because, of course, she wants it yesterday. Well, not really. But they do want my CD of about 60 images FedExed so they receive it no later than Saturday. Since there's a 90% chance of rain all day Tuesday and Wednesday here in Detroit, that means Thursday will be my only day to get this job done. Late this afternoon she added a couple of night shots as well. Emails were whizzing back and forth between us throughout the afternoon and into the early evening, eight in all. (After I'd disabled my spam filter, everything was going through OK.) We also had two long phone calls. My most exciting moment came late in the day when I received the answer to an email I'd sent to a friend who has lived in that neighborhood for 30 years. In it I'd asked if he knew where two sites were that she'd very much wanted me to photograph but had been unable to get any information about. My friend knew them both and told me exactly where to find them. That made the producer very happy indeed!
By the way, my photos will just be used for background, but the producer said that, as things develop, they might ask me to take some professional photos to be used in the documentary itself. No promises, but it could happen.
Getting back to my plans to prepare my Dualities to submit to LensWork. If it rains tomorrow, that might still happen, but who knows? Life obviously has its own agenda, and you know what? I love it that way. Life comes up with much more exciting plans than I ever could!
