Importance of Projects
Towards the end of last year, I was looking for ways to improve my photography in the new year. Looking for ideas, I hit the photo blogs and podcasts. Most of the advice out there was to just get out there and shoot, take a class, or work on a photographic project.
A photographic project is a connected set of photographs made with some theme or idea. It is also a step towards trying to say something more meaningful than you can with a single image. It also helps you, the photographer, have something to focus on, a reason to lift the camera up to your eye and click the shutter.
When it came time to decide on a personal project, I turned to Google to do some research to see what had been done. This research revealed these to be the most common photographic projects.
365 days: You take a photograph of something every day. A good place to see some examples of this is the Flickr group 365 days.
100 strangers: Over some set period of time, you make 100 portraits of 100 strangers. There is actually a website for this project at 100stangers.com.
A-Z: Go out on a photo walk and shoot the alphabet in any order, one photograph for every letter
52x: Similar to the 365-day project but where you do something every week, typically there is an overall theme, hence the x. A great example of this is the 52 suburbs project of Louise Hawson
Photo Essay: Telling a story through a series of images, generally in a journalistic way, covering a news story or some social issue. Some tips on doing an essay can be found on Digital Photography School, Part 1, Part 2
A simple Google search will yield many other ideas, but most will be a combination of the above ideas.
Notice one important thing about all the projects above: they generally work as a body of work, not a solitary image. So if you go through your archives and see that you have a lot of photographs with a similar theme, that is a photographic project that you have done without even realising it.
So, at the start of the year, I set myself some projects to work on. When deciding on a project, accessibility is one of the important things to take into account. Do you have easy access to your subject? This is becoming only too clear now.
So, at the start of 2011, I embarked on two projects: Street photography in Sydney and Beaches of the Royal National Park (RNP). And I set the seminally simple goal of producing one good image every month for a year. The street photography project has been going well, though it has slowed down due to the cool winter. The beaches of the RNP haven't even started; as I don't drive, I have a real access Issue. Hopefully, I will find the time to hike and go camping.
I was also lucky that another project came up early in the year: documenting a Theatrical society, which will be included in the upcoming proof sheets.
Not all projects need to be so long-term, nor do they need to be planned. Just go out there and have fun shooting.
