It has been a weird week and I thought I would peel back a layer in this week’s blog post to tell you about self-assignments. Photographers are told to keep a personal project going, to keep you sharp for when you are not working with clients. Sometimes those personal projects can connect you with a client and help you gain more work.
I have always had one going.
During the pandemic, I shot over 130 days of self-portraits after joining a Facebook Group Jennifer Moher started. I have long admired her work so I jumped at the chance to be in the group and later become part of a book she created to encapsulate the project.
The project I started after that is married to the words I write every day. Each morning I get up and open a new google document for the day, but the date at the top, save it in a folder, copy my astrology forecast into it and begin writing about how I feel after waking up. Journaling is a thing any therapist will tell you to take on to express yourself. It was especially helpful for me during the pandemic. During these days I spend time writing a minimum of 300 words and I marry those words with a photograph.
I carry my camera with me every day, I hardly ever leave the house without one. Of some kind.
Sometimes’s an old film camera loaded with expired film. Or a digital camera ready to shoot hung around my neck.
I have been using Flickr for more than a decade, long before it was purchased by Yahoo and went through so many transformations. I use it as my backup, aside from hard drives and Backblaze I use it too. I use it to download photos to my phone, edit them and post to Instagram. Flicker has been there for me since the beginning of my photo sharing process and I am happy it is still around because I am still using it the same way.
I realize that this is one of the longest posts I have created in a long time. I have been sitting on this project for months and will continue to grow it. I wanted to share because maybe it will spark a personal project in you too.
What personal projects have you been doing?
