Thursday, April 17, 2008

Projects

In my last post I put up some images from a near by grain elevator. When I showed some of the images to my wife and she thought a series of images of grain elevators might be interesting.

So a project was born.

I did some research on the net and compiled a list of nearby grain elevators. I have been to a lot of these places and don't ever recall seeing elevators in some of these places. I guess I just wasn't paying much attention.

I am generally not a project driven photographer, at least not consciously. Sure I am involved in photograpic projects at work or if I shoot stuff for other people, because these things are really project based.

But I am talking about my personal work. Most times I shoot with a subject or destination in mind, but not really as a project with a specific theme. It is very different to go out and create images for a definite reason and not shoot anything that doesn't relate to the project. That's not to say if the mother ship landed on 1st and Main while I was photographing for the project I would completely ignore it and not take an expsoure or two. I hear that The World Weekly News pays big time for those pictures.

I'm seeing big advantages in shooting with a project in mind. When I look through my older images of the same subject they sort of seem like they could be a project, but most times there is something missing that keeps that body of work from being a true project. When I do a project I'm forced to come up with some kind of a plan for what, when and where I'll shoot. It should make a more cohesive group of images that way.