Corin Bishop A.I.P.P.A – My Panel
As mentioned briefly in the article before, I’ve been made an Associate member of the Irish Professional Photographers Association (IPPA).
When you join the IPPA you must achieve a minimum standard to qualify and it gets you your ‘L’ plates (I like Roger Overall’s term for this), i.e. your Licentiate Qualification.
The next step up is to be an Associate Member and following that then a ‘Fellow’. It was about time I tried to get my Associate Qualification (as many of my colleagues kept reminding me). It’s not an easy thing to achieve so I’ve been putting it off for a while! To be honest I didn’t think I was ‘ready’ to give it a go.
To get the qualification the photographer must submit a body of work in the form of a ‘Panel’. The panel is made up of two rows of 10 images (20 in total). It’s not just a case of putting together a bunch of good images. The images must work together. They must compliment each other.It’s also important at this level to show a distinctive style. When putting the panel together it’s hard to show a distinctive style while still showing variation in subject, lighting, style, colour/mono etc. Again, one of the reasons I was putting it off!
For this panel I chose 10 colour images and then 10 mono images. I printed around 40 images in small prints and started shuffling them around to see what worked. The first panel I came up with was ok but it looked a little messy. After consulting my art director (de Wifey – Nicola!) she made some excellent comments and suggestions which gave me the confidence to make crucial changes and finish it off! So a few edits/reprints and bit more shuffling – and it was ready!
So after a lot of nail-biting I finally got the call and was delighted to have got it!
Enough waffle… have a look… and let me know what you think!
