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52 to Two

52 weekly photo shoots leading up to our son’s 2nd birthday.

This project is the sequel to my Daily Baby Project that documented all 365 days of our son’s first trip around the sun. That project was more about the moments than the photography itself – as all photos were merely snapshots taken with a smartphone. This year, it’s more about the photography – and the photographer.

Project Details – Draft

For now, I’m still working out the exact parameters for how to showcase the results of this project, but the mission statement of the project itself is already well defined:

Project Mission – Plan and execute 52 weekly photo shoots leading up to our son’s second birthday, documenting both his growth over time and the development of my own photographic style for portraiture.

Organizing and pulling off the photo shoots each week is the important aspect of the project right now – figuring out how to best share the images on the website will come in due time. My target, at least for now, is to have 3-5 high quality images from each shoot. Perhaps over time, as the images pile up, I may force myself to only pick 1 from each week to feature, we’ll see.

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The Challenges Ahead

With the emphasis of this project being on growing as a portrait photographer, it won’t be as successful if I don’t strive to challenge myself.

Sure, I could just as easily take shots of our son playing at home with his toys or his Mama once a week and call it a day. But why not take it further? I will be striving to keep things fresh and varied, so that I’m shooting in a wide range of scenarios and settings and not just the comforts of one room in our house.

What does that mean? I’m talking about doing outdoor shoots with natural light, indoor shoots with on-camera flash, posed sessions with studio lighting, black and white sessions, golden hour shoots, and, well you get the idea. Sure, I’ll end up repeating things a few times over the course of the year, but making an active attempt at trying new setups as often as possible is a great start.

The Images

For now, I’m sharing the images from this project in their own gallery. As the collection grows, I’ll likely split them up in some other fashion.

I will also try and post one image from each shoot on the blog as well, to help keep folks appraised of the project’s process and gain further interest, feedback, and suggestions as the year goes by.

Maui by Poster eBook

My first of hopefully many Maui themed eBooks.

This project came about while trying out apps on my iPad. I was trying out the app Phoster when I created a few posters with a few Maui images I had in my Camera Roll. Not shortly after that, I was thumbing through my libraries and resizing images and transferring to my iPad.

I threw it all together with Pages on my Mac, and now it’s out on the web as a free PDF download.

Find out more and grab a copy at http://www.dailymauiphoto.com/ebook


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Daily Baby Project

A photo a day for our son’s first year.

The idea sort of came about by itself 3 days after our son was born, when I realized that I already had a dozen photos on my smartphone in addition to the ones I was taking with my DSLR. With technology what it is today, it was so easy to snap shots with my phone while we were at the hospital and share with family and friends immediately. Sure, the quality wasn’t as great, and although I had my laptop with me in the hospital those first few days, firing open Photoshop and processing RAW files didn’t seem like a priority.

Images

As I’m crafting this page on the website, we still have two weeks left until our son turns 1. The photos are all saved in the Daily Baby photoset on my personal Flickr account, but for our friends and family to easily enjoy, they’re posted on our family blog as well. Since I’ve been using the Flickr API for years, it was a piece of cake throwing in the code to pull in each photo on the blog like that, and I imagine it’s only the start.

Speaking of his first birthday, I’ve also been doing work on a video slideshow for his baby luau we’re having. I hadn’t done the math in my head at the time, but a slideshow with 365 daily photos is one long slideshow. Luckily for our party guests, I was able to trim it down just a tad.

Links

Daily Maui Photo

“Your Daily Dose of Aloha!”

That tagline pretty much says it all. The website features a different Maui photo from my collection each day, thanks to some custom integration with Flickr. And it goes beyond just the website – it’s syndicated on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, RSS, and followed by thousands of users combined across those platforms. By far the largest draw of eyes to my photography.

In the Beginning

The concept for this project actually started a few years ago, when I originally created an iGoogle Gadget as a day calendar with a new photo every day. Since re-branding the entire offering under the “Daily Maui Photo” name late in 2010, it’s been greatly expanded in scope and support.

There are still a few more features I’d like to add for this project, as well incorporating more of my latest images from the 2011 Maui Photo Festival into the collection as well. The limitation there – of course – is not having enough free time, so I’ll have to wait until the cost of human cloning research drops substantially.

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