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.
View Image Gallery
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.
