week twelve. PPA meeting....

     Today was the second time that I went to a PPA meeting. They are always pretty interesting, but they can also get pretty boring. During the meeting, they were re-organizing the plans for each meeting and how they wanted to run them. This was all because they just got new board members. They all went around giving ideas for topics of the meetings, but pretty soon people started going off tangents and talking about how their website works in complex computer terms that most everyone didn't understand. By that point in the meetings I have to will myself to stay awake and focused. Finally, they all got back on subject and finished planning the next few month's meetings out. The subject of websites came back up once again. But this time it wasn't the technical part, it was the design part. They did a little website critiquing on a few of the photographer's websites. One little tidbit of funny information about website design is that if a website is all black, it was most likely designed by a man. I guess men like to have the color black as the background for a website. My mentor, Dan, had his website critiqued. The other photographers gave him tips on how to make it more appealing, how to put your name and number on the website clearly, and how to have a cohesive design on the website to reflect your marketing picture for your photography studio. They told him to get rid of this curly design on the home page of his website because it didn't go with his birch tree on all of his cards, photo bags, etc., they also told him to make his name bigger on the homepage so that when people accidentally come across the page they will know right away whose page it is and remember the name of the studio, and they told him to put his studio number on the home page also as to make it more accessible to people wanting to have their pictures taken by him. After the website critiquing, Dan shared some pictures of the photographers they had taken at their "pictures for Haiti" event. He created a montage of cutouts of the photographers doing silly poses. He also made a few other pictures of three of the photographers. He has been messing around with Photoshop, learning how to cut things out of pictures and put something else in the place of it and other things. Then finally, after a very long meeting, we were able to leave. By the time we got back to the studio, it was way too late to start looking at my pictures, so we just didn't look at them and saved them for next time. I think it's very interesting to go to the PPA meetings, and it's really cool to see all the different portrait photographers in Alaska and the different picture styles they have.