Definitely a better mood now than I was when I made that last post. Maybe I’m not quite that horrible, but I’m sure there should still be some sort of caveat involved. If only warming of my massive neurotic tendencies. But then, if you don’t catch on to that when you first meet me, I hold you responsible for not doing so…
God I want to go on a road trip. And I think I’ll actualyl do it this time. The fact that I don’t want to go immediately but next spring automatically means that this road trip plan is better thought out than any of my older ones. There’s still a bunch I want to do here in Chicago and still some things I need to do before I can go off on a road trip. For one thing, I need to get out of debt and pay off my computer before I can begin to do seriously think about leaving Chicago. And past that, I’ll need to get a new MF system and one of those motorized things with wheels…car, yeah, that’s it.
The basic concept and reasoning behind a road trip, though, is the same for this one as it has been for past ideas. I want to spend anywhere from a month to three months on the road with my camera. I’m not really sure where I’d go, or if I’d stay in any one place or area for any length of time. But it would be a solo thing and I’d come back with a much better understanding of myself and an enormouse, exciting new body of photographic work. How much work? Obviously, some days would be more inspired than others, but if I’m shooting 6x6cm negatives on black and white, I figure I’d average about six rolls per day. Extrapolate that and that gives you 180 rolls/2,160 exposures for a 30-day trip, 540 rolls/6,480 exposures for a 3 month trip. Film cost if I shoot Bergger BRF 200 would come to $520.20 and $1,560.60 respectively. $394.20 and $1,182.60 respectively if I shot Tri-X.
And because I actually feel like figuring this stuff out right now, I give you the following figures for film cost if I shot 8×10 the whole time, averaging 20 sheets of film per day. Bergger BPF 8×10 film comes to $2.58 per sheet, yielding 1 month and 3 month film costs of $1,548.00 and $4,644.00. Ilford HP5+, at $2.238 per sheet yields 1 month and 3 month film costs of $1,342.80 and $4,028.40.
Scary, isn’t it? But then, I think it’s pretty obvious why I’m choosing to shoot medium format and not 8×10 on this trip. Costs for shooting 4×5 would fall somewhere in between the two.
It would not be a cheap trip to make, but it would be worth it, both personally and financially. Not only would I have a better idea of what I wanted to do with my life following the trip, but I would have a whole new body of work that I could use to get into the “fine art” circuit with print sales and (what I’m more interested in) limited edition portfolios. I’m assuming print sales are pretty straight forward. Whether at art shows or throgh galleries or whatever, it’s a matter of selling high-end matted prints. Nothign too complicated about it. What most of you probably aren’t familiar with, though, is the practice of selling complete print portfolios.
While the word portfolio has all sorts of meanings depending on context, here it refers to a set of identical groups of prints put out as a special sort of thing for colectors and art appreciators. If I do a portfolio, the first one will likely be 20 sets of 10 images. All prints would be dry mounted and then matted on archival board. The prints would be put in a custom portfolio box with interleaving and a small printed piece regarding the work and what went into it. While pretty expensive, the cost of a portfolio is overall less than what you would pay if you were to buy all the constituent prints individually. In the long run, porfolios can become more valuable as well, since there’s only, say, 20 or 30 of a particular portfolio and any number of individual prints of an image.
Another thing I like about printing limited portfolios is that it allows me to offer something to buyers that tend to only like to buy “limited” things. While I think that people should buy artwork because they like it and not because of how much they think it’ll be worth, there’s no getting around it. Some people won’t buy prints that aren’t in a limited edition because there’s no way of knowing how many will be made. And from their perspective, it isn’t as good an investment as buying something that they know there will only ever be a certain number of. I do not now nor will I ever limit my prints in general. It isn’t practical to keep producing an unlimited number of portfolios, though. In practical terms, they are self-limiting. And so the problem of limited editions sort of solves itself to an extent. If a collector wants my work and wants something limited, he can just buy a portfolio, which is a better investment to begin with.
Anyhow, I’m all about this road trip. Just need the cash to get me there and maybe I can roll on it right into a whole new part of my career. Who knows, it just might happen…
