It seems such a long time ago now but its been just over a year since my first acceptance into a FIAP salon, I was mainly intrigued by Ciaran Whyte’s blog on What the F@ck is FIAP. So I thought what have I got to lose except for a bit of cash, I entered 6 images into Photoclub Danube and was surprised to get 4 accepted on my first try. I was a tad flabbergasted especially as two of them were nudes, in the past my art nude images have received luke warm attention yet here they were now in an international salon. After a bit more investigation into the is FIAP stuff I found the criteria for the distinctions had changed, the first level called AFIAP required at least 40 acceptances using 15 different images in 15 different salons and from at least 8 different countries, with 10% being prints (4). Hmmm that seemed do-able as I had 18 months to do it in as the FIAP submissions are in Dec every year and you must have over 12 months since your first acceptance.      
It all sounded a bit tricky at first glance but the more I looked at it the more I thought I could do it, I just needed 15 killer images. And in there lies the perplexing part of the issue, I have hundreds of images but which ones are killer images? in honesty I didn’t have a clue, I only had my experience at camera club competitions to guide me. I started off using images that I thought had impact and that were technically good and to some extent that worked and those guides are still valid, however I was soon to find out that certain images do not work in certain countries and that some salons prefer digital art or composites to straight photographs. And so into the FIAP maze I went, feeling my way along as best as I could.
The most troublesome part was gaining print acceptances, most of the English and Scottish salons did print based salons, however I got very few acceptances and this still stands today. It would seem that most of the print salons I had entered do not like nudes, even though these same images did very well elsewhere as digital. I found that gaining acceptances wasn’t much of a problem, within six months I had over 100 acceptances but I still only had 2 prints accepted, in fact I had well exceed the criteria for AFIAP except for prints. This was mainly due to inexperience at targeting the right image to the right salon, I had been sending prints to salons that just didn’t value my style of photography. By the time I did get 4 prints I was more than halfway to fulfilling the EFIAP requirements and had picked up some awards too. Awarded images :-