Completely personal projects

sabbath999 · Nov 24, 2008

Do you all have any completely personal projects in photography?

I have several.

I went through about 10 years where I didn't take ANY pictures at all (total burnout) and then I started shooting "snapshots" in 2005 with a horrible junky camera... I didn't try to do anything but "snaps" since I specifically didn't want to "work" at photography again, so most of my first digital shots are really, really bad.

My Zoopictures.net (clicky) started out as one of these back in 2006, when I just had a junky 4mp noisy non-IS point and shoot that was several years old.

I have another one that is "Hawaii", my personal album of the Big Island (our second home)... a few of these are decent. (Here is one of the galleries from that project, the others are not online yet) Hawaii January 2008

A third personal project is "Civil War Battlefields & Reenactments", most of which were taken with that same bad point & shoot... I am going to be actually starting to take some quality pictures for this pretty soon... this one is actually online at my google account if anybody wants to see it (most of the shots are really bad, many are taken in the dead of winter and some are shot in near darkness). Several just contain two or three shots "to show we were there".

My pictures are shot just for me... I didn't take them to share them, I took them to be personal memoirs of places and times in my life.

What purely personal projects do you have going on?

Chris of Arabia · Nov 24, 2008

Just my "Petrol Pump Attendants" series. Not very old yet, but it's gradually growing, but only as fast as I need to fill up.

abraxas · Nov 24, 2008

Just my shots of grandkids. Other than that everything I shoot ends up being used in one way or another. Still, it's all about my personal enjoyment. My hobbies have always turned into my living.

Overread · Nov 24, 2008

hmm my general personal project is to get better than I am currently with photography (says the newb) and to that end I keep a (very badly updated) blog which I use to document my shooting and perform a little bit of self critique with.
Beyond that I tend to have smaller projects which are mostly me just trying out new things in photography.
The only longer term project that I am thinking of doing is a stopmotion animation using my camera, though I have not started that yet (go to get home to get props and such) and the only downside I can see is that it will eat shutter actuations

frXnz kafka · Nov 24, 2008

All of my photography projects are personal, seeing as I'm not getting paid for any of it

But I've been focusing on night photography a lot lately. I've been going around shooting on TMax pushed 3 stops to ISO 3200. You don't really get the effect on screen, but here's what I've got so far, plus some older shots and a few digitals:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/frxnz/sets/72157603535088713/

Alleh Lindquist · Nov 24, 2008

Personal projects I think are a huge part of developing your skills and reinventing your portfolio to represent to work you want to be doing.

I am always coming up with new concepts for personal projects that I believe will better place me in a position to get paid jobs more along the lines of the work I want to be paid for. In the end it's not about doing photography for a living it's about doing the type of photography you want to do for a living. Right now I am trying to plan a pretty big lineup of outdoor shoots like rock climbing, mountaineering, snowboarding/skiing, camping, kayaking etc. so I can go over outdoor clients such as REI and North Face. In the end I want to be an extreme outdoor photographer hanging off cliffs and sh*t. I also very much enjoy fashion but I am exploring concepts that have more of an advertising twist to them.

Things would get boring fast without doing my own projects.