Introducing Jellyfish with a contest to help me name them

My newest fine art photography project is a series of semi-abstract closeup photos of moon jellyfish. It's due to make its public debut at a show in Wisconsin in July, which means I'm beginning the process of preparing for the show now.

As my photography progresses it has been heading more and more toward abstraction. My architectural photos have been gradually getting more abstract as I go along. My animal photos wander back and forth between levels of abstraction, depending on my mood at the time. But this series is another significant step in that direction.

They started on a single day in early 2017, not with a lot of intention. I spend a lot of time at my local zoo, as you may have seen from my baby tapir post. While that means I have a lot of opportunity to get different animal photos, especially those that come from long experience with the individual animals, it can also be very repetitive. There's a fairly limited range of opportunities in that environment, and I'm always looking for something new to explore, whether it's looking at an animal differently, finding an unusual view of an exhibit, or using a new piece of photography equipment.

For a long time, I had stayed out of the aquarium-focused Discovery bay exhibit. It's very dark, and they have several large tactile exhibits, which not only aren't very photogenic but lead to having tons of little kids running around wildly at all times. When I first started doing zoo photography seriously I was a natural-light-only photographer, and I just got out of the habit of going to Discovery Bay at all. After I took up flash photography it didn't occur to me to go back there for quite a while. But one day I did, on a day I had my flash and my macro lens, and the results were highly rewarding.

While I've spent a lot of time and effort to become a high-quality inkjet printer, it was clear right away that these were going to need something else. They have a luminous quality about them that doesn't show up as well as I would like even on glossy paper. So I took the next step. I had been casually looking for something that I might want to print on metal, after seeing some other photographers' work. It works really nicely for some subjects like cars that I just don't do. My work is generally quieter, but I saw the potential for the jellyfish to be bright and luminous while still maintaining some of the quiet quality that I'm looking for in my work.

I also really wanted them to be large to magnify the effect of the macro photography. So I'm making them as 24" x 36" prints on aluminum. They're surprisingly hard to photograph well; I've gone through a bunch of attempts, trying to capture the presence they have in a room. The one above is the best I've been able to do so far, but I don't think it's quite there. I think it's interesting that the hardest thing I've ever had to photograph was my own photographs.

You may have noticed that I'm putting the images into the post without telling you the titles. That's because right now most of them have really crappy titles. They're called things like "February Jellyfish 78." And that's where the contest part of this post comes in. I have to fill out an inventory list for the curator, which means that all of these need real titles, and I'd like your help coming up with some.

My titling scheme for these is somewhere between surrealist and magic realist. Here's a list of the titles I already have for some of the series:

The Augury She Always Wanted
The Breathless Rigidity of Pseudoscience
Searching for Omelas in All the Wrong Places
Our Metropolitan Hamburger Is a Bad Idea
A Short Brimless Felt Hat Barely Blocks Out the Sound of a Celtic Violin
Relaxing in Basins at the End of Inlets Terminates the Endless Tests from the Box
She Speaks The Language of Pears

These sort of phrases come up every once in a while in conversation around here (because we're weirdos) and I try to write them down when I do. But I have a hard time just sitting down and writing them, so I thought I would ask for help. I need about 11 more of these, and I think each of them is worth 1 SBD to me. So comment with your ideas, and if I decide I want to use them, I'll send you a transfer.

By entering the contest you agree that if you win you allow me the right to use your submission as the title of an artwork in perpetuity with no further compensation.