GET INSPIRED
How do you decide on a subject for your project?
Photography is a funny old hobby when you think about it. We invest all this money in expensive equipment, spend years honing our skills both behind the camera and at the computer, get up ridiculously early, stay out half the night and travel the world in pursuit of great images – for what?
Having gone to great effort and expense, the photographs we produce often end up languishing on a computer hard drive, never to see the light of day again. A few may end up on social media, entered into club competitions, or shared with other photographers on sites such as Flickr or 500px. But the rewards for doing this rarely exceed the effort and many photographers eventually lose interest.
A personal project is a great way to keep you focused and inspired. It can cover anything you choose and can be as short or long term as you like. If you enjoy travel, you could buy a one-day return ticket to a town or city you’ve never visited before, turn up, spend a few hours wandering around taking photographs, and when you get back on the train to head home, that’s the project over. Alternatively, you could go back to the same location – a town or city, a beach, an area of woodland – time after time for six months or a year and create a body of work.
Personal projects can also be subject- or technique-based. If you like shooting long exposures with a ten-stop ND filter, that could be the basis of a project – to shoot coastal locations or urban scenes. If you’ve had an old DSLR converted to infrared, why not set yourself a project to shoot old buildings in infrared in the spooky style of the late Sir Simon Marsden? Or how about photographing a town or city at night, when the streets are deserted, in black and white? Your home town would be ideal, partly because you live there so it’s accessible, but also because once you start looking at it as a photographer instead of a resident, you’ll see it in a completely different light – and find hidden gems that you’d ignored due to familiarity.
Ultimately, the subject of your project doesn’t matter providing that you’re interested in it. The aim of personal projects is to give yourself a purpose and motivation to pick up a camera when time permits and have a creative goal in mind.