I really enjoy photography, but am as mercurial about practicing it as I am with maintaining this blog, which is to say, spotty at best. I love shooting, but am terrible at following up with the post-processing and sharing of the resulting images. I’m also a gadget geek, so I love getting new photo equipment, so either the lust for a new piece of kit fires me up to take more photos, or vice-versa. Either way, I’m in one of those periods now. I got a new Nikon V1 a few days ago, and it’s been my current muse. I decided to shoot only with it over the holidays, and have now made more than 1500 images with it, mostly family snapshots. In any case, I’m shooting.
I’ve been thinking of doing a photo project of some sort, but I’ve been uncertain as to the form that would take. I’m of the mind that self-made projects can be fun, but I know I lack the drive to really tackle something like a 365-day project like is popular on sites like Flickr. (Not to mention that this year would be a 366-day project, since it’s a leap year.) I’d also like my project to involve the presentation side of photography in some way, and there’s really no way I’m going to process, upload and/or print photos every day.
What I think I’ve settled on is this: I’m going to attempt do two projects. The first is a 52-week project–a photo a week; I think that I can manage to keep that pace. Whether or not they’ll be terribly good or interesting photos remains to be seen. In any case, there it is, simple enough. Here’s a photo I made today, with some new toys I bought over the holidays:
The second project will be to make at least one print per month. It might be one of the pictures from the 52-week project, but I won’t limit myself to that. I do have a backlog of slides and negatives that I’d like to get to scanning, and perhaps one of those, or another image I’ve taken, will strike my fancy. I miss the black-and-white darkroom, but there’s no getting around the fact that digital imaging is better than anything I was ever able to accomplish in the darkroom. I enjoy producing a good print, and I’m hoping this project might rekindle that passion.
I’m also planning on exploring matting and framing during this exercise. I’ll probably adorn my offices at home and work with some of the resulting prints, and if my wife likes any of them well enough, maybe I’ll even hang some in my home. We’ll see where this all goes. Who knows, maybe I’ll even do a better job of posting here, with images from and updates on these projects as material. ;)