Today’s (11th May, 2021) session was ALL ABOUT SALONS, where Krishna Bhat, lead of the Salon Participation Subcommittee, educated our members on various aspects related to the salon participation. Here’s a brief report on the session…
Krishna Bhat got prompted to call today’s meeting of YPS Salon Participation Group, due to his recent observation of one of our group members submitting images to a European salon with skewed aspect ratio. Obviously, all the images got low scores and rejected since they appear abnormal. That was a waste of hard-earned money to the tune of Euro 25/-! Same member submitted the images to two more salons abroad and no wonder they all got rejected, wasting the money paid as salon fees.
Obviously much time was spent on all about image resizing while keeping the aspect ratio intact. A few members shared how are they achieving the various image resizing needs including the image dimension and file size. Krishna demonstrated them using Adobe Photoshop. How to set the image format (sRGB), cropping/composing and resizing the images for horizontal or vertical formats was shown live using an example image. Soon the group got into active discussion and questions on various aspects of image resizing and preparing for salons. Finally, some time was spent on preparing the images for print salons, their sizes and papers used.
Next part was about the image titles. Image title, though not part of judging process, shouldn’t be ignored since they are the direct reflection of an author’s knowledge about the subject especially in nature section. Sticking to the length restriction, avoiding special characters and numbers, ensuring correct spelling and species names in nature section were discussed.
Then Krishna took up the topic of how to choose the appropriate salons for participation. He stressed the importance of choosing the genuine salons among the hundreds of them floating around. Most of them just limited themselves to issuing acceptances and awards but do not really host the salon physically or now during the pandemic virtually.
As usual there were questions about submitting the same image under different sections of a salon, retitling Vs keeping the same title and on what is an ‘open’ section. Krishna answered those questions.
It was encouraging to see the participation of more than 65 members through the session and many newcomers to YPS who are yet to start their salon participation. There were questions about how to select pictures for a salon and how to start salon participation. It showed that we need to have more of these sessions and as president H Satish suggested, perhaps on a fixed day – Wednesday of each week. This is for the Salon Participation Subcommittee to take up and implement in the coming days.
Thanks to Krishna Bhat for the informative and educative session.
-V Madhusudana D Rao, AFIAP, cMoL (LM-220)
Her’s how our members felt (Source Instagram):
