Planning for Personal Projects...

I don't view a 'style' as what camera format you shoot, whether you use prime lenses or zoom lenses, or whether you shoot film or digital.. etc. I view a style as how you see and approach a subject, how you compose a subject and how you use the technical aspects of photography (lens choice, aperture choice, printing options) to portray the subject. As time has gone by I now feel comfortable with my style of photography. I too was unclear at first. Finding cameras that fit the way I prefer to work really helped, and I went through many camera systems until I settled on medium format rangefinders. They fit the way I like to work and see. After shooting and shooting and looking back and editing it became clearer. It has taken me 6 years in black and white shooting, doing the entire process myself to get to this point.

jnanian said:

it is very hard to do a series of photographs of subjects that are very close to you.
the best suggestion i can give is to just photograph as much as possible the subjects that you enjoy.
don't put any boundaries on anything - use whatever equipment you want, and let yourself get carried away.
don't edit yourself until time has passed ... then look at everything you have shot
and decide what you like and don't like ... and then make more photographs ...
eventually you will find a vein or a stream to follow and everything will fall into place.

don't for get to have fun
john

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Well put. +1

Greg Davis said:

Alec Soth, for example, says he created his work "Sleeping by the Mississippi" over two years of just shooting, then editing down to a cohesive body of images.

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Another fine example of the one camera, one lens body of work, in this case, 8x10 with a 300mm lens (which I believe is more or less "Normal" focal length at that size)

I talked with Alec a bit after a speech here in Atlanta, and he said he always set a goal for a day of a certain number of photos. He also said he was "the guy with the box of negatives under the bed" and spoke of "the good old days" when he was working on the Miss project. I think he experienced a bit of shock when he went from being that guy with the box of negs under the bed to the darling of the art photography world. He went from no expectations to suddenly very high expectations. I suspect you start wondering if it's all just an accident, if you perhaps really aren't good enough to warrant all the attention, or if you can actually live up to the expectations that others have set for you.

He seems to have done quite well, and still uses that same camera and lens (with the exception of his Columbia book, which was all MF)

A local film photographer, Tom Fox of tomfoxphotography.com, has done a series on the wolf river area simply because it interested him. Now it is a series of books and speaking tours. I had a college proffesor tell me once that thinking to much kills the creative process. Find what interests you and shoot it, don't get caught up in what film, lens or format, just grab a camera and go. Keep track of what you used and look over what you have so that you can return to a particular subject later with a format/lens/film that you feel would work better. I have a ton of stuff that I will be revisiting next year but one of them can never be shot again since it has been torn down. As of this moment, I am the only photographer with prints/negatives of this historic site before the destruction. Two things I always have with me are a camera and an idea and of the two the camera is the most important. An idea without a camera is just an idea but a camera without an idea is an opportunity.

guitstik said:

Find what interests you and shoot it, don't get caught up in what film, lens or format, just grab a camera and go. Keep track of what you used and look over what you have so that you can return to a particular subject later with a format/lens/film that you feel would work better.

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This is part of my problem. I never return to improve upon things. I've got "Image A.D.D." or something. Once I shoot something, and either develop it or have it printed, I mentally move on to something else. It's almost an "ok good enough" type of thinking, or at least the "been there, done that" attitude. I loose interested in a subject matter too easily I guess. Or maybe i've just not found something that interests me enough.....

You just need to give it time. I bet if you took a survey you would find that a large number of photographers will let an image sit for a long time before they decide to do something about it. I have a tendency to go back over an area that I have shot on numerous occasions with any number of systems and film just because I might see something different or from another angle or even a different light. I have several projects that I am wanting to do, I have a loose idea of what I want to do but all I do is go out and shoot. Sooner or later I will start to get more of a cohesive idea from the prints/negatives I have. For me, it's not an overnight thing but over a span of time and that could mean years instead of weeks or months. The best advice I can give is not to force it. If you put to much pressure on yourself to "create" you won't come up with anything. A common theme that has been running through all of the answers so far is "just shoot".

The posts above on Alec Soth reminded me of how he used lists taped to his steering wheel as he drove around.
A couple of articles about his lists - here and here.
I like the idea of thinking around a subject and coming up with a shot list and then letting each image lead to the next as Soth calls it.

I have actually been planning a project for the last few weeks. It is still in the very early stages. But after I decided what the subject was, (they are going to be environmental portraits) not going to give much away. The next thing was to figure out the best way to make the project look seamless. The way to do that was use one camera and one lens and one film. It just happens to me a 4x5, 150, txp. this is the was that I want to pictures to look and feel. I am now into picking the individual subjects, and logistics.

ChristopherCoy said:

This is part of my problem. I never return to improve upon things. I've got "Image A.D.D." or something. Once I shoot something, and either develop it or have it printed, I mentally move on to something else. It's almost an "ok good enough" type of thinking, or at least the "been there, done that" attitude. I loose interested in a subject matter too easily I guess. Or maybe i've just not found something that interests me enough.....

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Christopher:

More likely you just haven't given it enough time.

guitstik's definition of "later" is probably a lot later than you have allotted for this.

My recent gallery upload "Fungi and Fallen" was a shot I took at a site I have been wandering around quite a bit for the last three years.

And I recently took some shots at a site that I revisited again after a lapse of almost 40 years.

Here is "Fungi and Fallen":

ChristopherCoy said:

This is part of my problem. I never return to improve upon things.

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I know what you mean.

There are parts of the John Muir Trail (near approaches) that I end up revisiting out of necessity. At the ledge a few miles south of Sally Keyes lake there's an uprooted snag I enthusiastically shot on my first time up the trail. On the last trip I walked down past it saying "oh yeah, the gates of hell."

I was once forced to overcome this, and came out with more than I expected.

A couple years back the boy scout troop planned a week at summer camp near Big Sur, on the Little Sur river/creek that I had several favorite pictures from. A creek is a minor landscape, not a grand landscape. I was afraid I'd come back with nothing. Actually, I came back with something I didn't expect. I came back with something very much like Equivalents. My Style came through and the prints from different decades fit together as if they were taken on the same trip. Had I already progressed as far as I ever will when I first started out? Does my new work add to itself or rehash old ground? Darned thing about photography is that you can make great shots immediately. And the improvement you make over the years can be very subtle.

One thing to take into consideration, are you the same person from as little as a year ago? More than likely you have changed. The way you look at a scene is not the same today as a year past. The same goes for something that you shot last year, it has probably gone through changes either landscaping, remodeling or a tree has fallen across the old home stead and it's no longer there. As a photographer, the moment we begin to stop moving and changing is the time to put the camera up. Try something new, think outside of the box and grow as a photographer. Then the projects will start to take on a life of their own. I actually do have A.D.D but I have never used it as an excuse. I realize the problem and try to find ways around it. Don't make excusess unless it is more fun than making pictures.

ChristopherCoy said:

This is part of my problem. I never return to improve upon things. I've got "Image A.D.D." or something. Once I shoot something, and either develop it or have it printed, I mentally move on to something else. It's almost an "ok good enough" type of thinking, or at least the "been there, done that" attitude. I lose interested in a subject matter too easily I guess. Or maybe i've just not found something that interests me enough.....

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Christopher -- I'm a lot like you in some ways. I shoot a variety of formats, films, and subjects -- whatever interests me. I thought too, that I had no particular style, and I couldn't come up with any real ideas for a personal project. However, as I have little to no access to a darkroom most of the time, it has meant that it can be months, even years, before I make contact sheets (and if I'm lucky, prints) of all that I've shot. So when I finally had access to a darkroom again, I knew I needed to make my time count and took a good look at all my contact sheets to see what kind of portfolio of work I could put together. And it became clear after looking at all the work that I've done over the years that I could easily put 3 or 4 portfolios together of a good number of images. And it was also evident that even though I tend to think "I'm this kind of photograher" or "I shoot all kinds of images", the reality is that I actually do focus on particular subjects (consciously, unconsciously) and that the images I like the best all do conform (mostly) to a particular style.

Since then (this realization came a couple of years ago) I still have those porfolio subjects in mind whenever I go shooting so that I can further add to them. I didn't need to come up with a project -- the projects were already there, I just had to "see" them.

you can have add ... just keep shooting, you don't need to go back and reshoot anything.
the thing is, the more you shoot, the better you get at your subject matter.
if AFTER you look at your work down the road, you say --- this is nice, but i wish i did this instead
then you can go back on your own terms to do whatever it is you want to do.

i used to just expose 1 or 3 frames all the time, and looking back over all the film i exposed in those days
i now wish i wasn't so stingy with my exposures or time. nowadays i can go back to the same place and it is
almost like i wasn't there a week or a month or a day before ..

just have a good time, and everything will fall into place