Iowa State Fair Photography Salon - 2024

I absolutely love the Iowa State Fair Photography Salon. Once a year, our state becomes a cultural mecca for photographers. Each year, over 800 photographers submit up to four photos to the State Fair in June. We all wait anxiously to hear back on how many (if any) of our photographs were admitted in a sea of 1820 entries. I'm pretty sure I signed up for Informed Delivery from the post office just so I could see in the morning of notification that I'd need to be certain to check the mail that day.

Don't I have nice thumbs?

As usual, this year I submitted four photos. As you can see from the form above, I had two admitted this year, and was alerted that I received at least one award. You can't tell what photos, what award(s), or anything other than what you see here until the fair. This is both incredibly exciting and intensely nerve-wracking. My daughter and I were to go to Europe on the third day of the fair this year, so we had to take time off of work to go on the Thursday on which it opened.

Day of, we were hopping on the tram in the parking lot to head to the fairgrounds, when a friend of mine sent me a message - he'd taken a selfie of himself in front of my photo which had won the Superintendent's Choice award for Adult Color photos! For reference, there is a Best In Show for adults, as well as one for color and one for black-and-white. Those are selected as a consensus between that year's judges (the three rotate each year). Then, the Superintendent(s) pick what their choice is for best photograph in the salon out of all of the photos. Since the Color category makes up approximately 71% of 524 accepted adult photos (and 78% of the 1820 adult photos submitted), I was so honored! Here's a photo of C in front of his photo:

One would think we should have been able to find some corn around at the Fair to recreate the photo...

Here is that photo's original - I had submitted it to the Farm Life class:

Title: "So Close...!"; Class: Farm Life

I've had a bunch of people ask me if we intended to line up his missing tooth and the corn kernels like that. I usually am not one to pose photos too much, I like to let them happen - but this was an instance where I had a very specific, predetermined vision that dated all of the way back to when we went to the grocery store (admittedly the day before), I saw the corn and his newly missing tooth, and a light bulb ignited. I even went so far as to eat the rest of the corn to get the right look, loaded C and the corn in the car, and we drove to a nearby farm to take this photo and some backups. I love the boy's freckles so much, so I'm so glad someone else loved this photo!

Another photo of him got accepted, this one in the Color - People class (A is less into having me submit her photo these days now that she's a high schooler):

Title: "Third Grade Is Tough."

I entitled this photograph, "Third Grade Is Tough." It makes it look like C is this really rough child. To the contrary, what I enjoy about it most is that he got this black eye on a friend's trampoline when he hit his face on his own knee. And what I also enjoy about it is that he did the other eye two weeks later, in case anyone was interested. I have photos of him visiting Santa this year with a black eye, as well as during our December photos, which I clearly put on our holiday cards.

I have no shame in exploiting this injury.

The other two photos I submitted that were not admitted are shown below:

I don't really remember what I named this, but submitted it in Black-And-White Plants and Flowers. I maybe should have named it "Big Old Loser."

I submitted this bad boy in the Panorama category. And I should have named it something like, "Please Share My Sense of Humor."

That's really all I've got from Iowa State Fair Photography Salon of 2024. I am pretty sure that I have peaked artistically there, so it's all downhill from here.