A Lesson in Humility

By sovknight | November 3, 2008

A couple of months ago, I got an e-mail from a magazine editor asking permission to use one of my photographs in their publication.  I reported on that here, and the prospect was exciting to me.  It’s not an everyday occurrence that someone notices my stuff, and the fact that they offered to publish it and pay me for it was a delightful bonus.  I couldn’t have been happier.

Of course, like so many things in life, what sounds too good to be true always is.  The Fall edition of the magazine is out, complete with the article that the editor promised, but my picture is nowhere to be seen.  I suppose I should have gotten the clue when two e-mails that I sent were ignored.  You’d think I’d have learned my lesson by now about trusting people, but it appears I haven’t.  Maybe I never will.

There are things that burn me up about it though.  Set aside the fact that I wasn’t published or paid for a second.  That’s fine.  It’s business, and I’m sure they had a reason to stiff me.  Or maybe my e-mails are in a spam filter somewhere, or maybe they got a better deal with someone else.  I certainly hope they didn’t actually pay for the picture they ended up using, because it sucks ass.  Let me show you.

Here is the picture they offered to buy from me:

This is, of course, the Spiral Jetty in northern Utah.  Kinda cool, isn’t it?

Here’s the picture in the magazine:

Isn’t it wonderful, in all of its glory, complete with massive amounts of digital noise, false colors, and bad exposure?

I don’t know who took this picture, because there’s no photographer credit on it at all.  I assume it’s been colored all funky for “artistic interpretation” reasons, but that doesn’t make it a good shot.  I’m not saying my picture is the greatest thing ever, but I honestly believe it’s ten times better than what they went with.  I mean, seriously.  At least I went through the effort of removing any digital noise I found.  Artistic interpretation aside, at least my picture was clean.

So yeah, I’m kinda mad.  I was led to believe that my picture was good enough to be published, good enough to have an impact on someone, and good enough to represent the focus of the article.  In a sense, I was being praised.  That made me happy.  Turns out I was simply being duped.  Maybe in order to actually be published, I need to shit-ify all my pictures more. I don’t know.  I feel a little betrayed I guess.  After all, would it have really been so hard for the editor to shoot me a quick e-mail saying that they decided to go with someone else?  I guess it was just simpler to ignore me.

Whatever.  I don’t need the Wasatch Journal anyway.  I know my pictures are good, and they’re getting better as I learn more and gain experience.  It’s only a matter of time.  I’ll just chalk up another lesson in humility and move on.