First, I once again need to point to TOP for an insighful view on photography, in this case related to New Year's resolutions. Myself, I have never made such a resolution. Although I have made occasional resolutions, I have never done any at New Year. Last year one of the resolutions I made was experimenting with the square format (1:1 aspect ratio), which proved to be a good idea.
But I'm digressing. Let's quote TOP: "I know the most popular answer to the question of New Year's resolutions now is not to make any, because we never keep them anyway (although I kept mine last year), but just in case you might be looking to improve your photography in 2011, I have a small bit of modest advice. Set mechanical goals. That is, goals of time, number, frequency, or duration. Photography is a game of doing, and things get done only when you get going and do them."
Indeed: get going and do things. You learn by doing, especially when it is a thing in which there are few other sources of learning available. Developing your individual approach to photography is such a thing. Do it.
Even though I haven't made any New Year's resolutions, I made at Flick a set of 12 photographs from 2010. These photographs are for various reasons important to me. There is not much in common: most are square but not all, many are landscape photographs but not all, some are popular (up to 786 views at Flick) but some are not (3 views).
What is common to these photographs is a kind of challenge (unique to each photograph) which I would like to explore in 2011. But this is not a resolution, just a note to myself.
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I had kept the matter a profound secret.
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2 comments:
When you say "challenge" to each photograph, do you mean it's a particular type of photograph that has it's own requirements / skills to execute well?
I think there's a lot of merit in picking a small set of photos that are firstly favourites but secondly cover the range of genres you photograph in. From year to year you can then see if your are progressing in a genre and also adding / dropping other genres.
And then there's the "third dimension" (or it is higher?) of post-processing an image...
@Sven: In a way, yes: each type has its own challenges. But this was a more personal matter, I felt that I could and would like to do better with each type of photograph, so this is a kind of "reference" set to return to at some point.
Interestingly, I didn't include any b&w photographs into the set. Just didn't cross my mind, I wonder why. Maybe this time of the year doesn't encourage thinking about b&w.
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