As a photographer, it’s important to keep pushing yourself to take photos frequently, especially as someone who is learning photography, there is no better way to learn. One way of doing this is to set yourself a project. I’ve mentioned a few ideas for projects in other articles, but this time I thought I’d share with you an ongoing project that I am doing.
As someone who has a day job that isn’t related to photography and often requires long hours in the office, I find it tricky to carry a camera around and try and take photos regularly, but being a bit of a gadget geek, I have an iPhone (other phones are available…. but really don’t count hehe) which has a fairly decent camera built in. I have my phone with me all the time so choosing to use my phone for my photography project seemed like a good thing to do. It’s convenient, I can edit the shots if I want to and I can upload the images to my flickr account easily. So that solved the camera and the convenience. Now for the project.
A lot of people in several of the photo communities I belong to were doing projects which involved taking a photo a day for a year. Quite an undertaking but I thought with the convenience factor of my camera on my phone, it wouldn’t be too difficult and would provide an interesting result.
I follow quite a few photographers online and one of my favourites is a character known as Lomokev who specialises in Lomography which is a fairly niche type of photography, but a very popular one, that involves using old film cameras that aren’t particularly advanced, various types of film and some cross processing techniques. In one of his talks I watched online, he talked about an app for the iPhone that allowed him to take a picture of himself everyday and then once you have a few you can create an animation that shows you how you change over a period of time. Obviously you try and keep your face in the same position for each photo and there are features of the app that help you do this. I thought that was a fab idea, so that’s what I’m currently doing and have been doing since my birthday at the end of September last year so already I have a big set of images.
I’m planning on doing this for a full year so I’ll be writing another article with the finished animation in the Autumn. The convenience of being able to do it all with my iPhone is a huge benefit and while the photos aren’t amazing, they have me in them for a start, the project forces me into taking a photo where ever I am.
So why don’t you start a simple project? Leave a comment with a link to the images you create and share your ideas with other people viewing this site. It would be great to see the results.