First Zapplication

In making the leap to the next level of shows, I've jumped through the hoops to get set up with a service called Zapplication. This system is used by many higher-end craft shows to handle the application and jury organizing process.

The idea is pretty simple - you upload your photos to their service and then attach those photos to applications when you submit them. They publish a set of guidelines for photo submissions, and these are what I've used to tailor my photography to the jurors' experience.

On the other end, their software helps the jurors to review the photos for each applicant and score them.

I worked with "my copy editor", one of the guys in the collective who has a gift for words. I finally hit "send" on the application last night.

Then I set out to copy the final photos to my phone to write this blog post. When the iPhone displayed it with a black background, I was horrified to find a mistake in one of the images. It's not huge, but might just be big enough to take points off my application and keep me out of the show. I'm kind of kicking myself for not noticing until it went live. And, I thought I had set up the file to prevent this and I thought I had checked for it before I uploaded it.

Grrrr...

See? It's not a big deal. Just a single strip of white pixels along the bottom of one pane of a triptych. But, these images are going be have a black background applied during jurying and probably be projected to fill a wall.

Ah, well. What's done is done. I seem to make at least one mistake like this the first time I do anything. It keeps me humble, right?