Project 52 – weeks 1 & 2

To get better at taking pictures there is only one thing to do, take more pictures. In an effort to get better it seems that I am joining every single photo project that is starting up in January. What’s left of my organizational anal retentiveness flares its head in January and I aim to become more organized and super scheduled for the new year. My goal this year, it seems, is to be taking pictures every day…and at the rate I’m going, with the projects I’ve joined, you might as well go ahead and super glue my camera to my face.

I want to, overall, be a better picture taker (I will not call myself a “photographer”…not yet, not sure when I’ll feel justified to do that). But more than that, I want to be a better storyteller. Our daily lives are actually what make up the majority of our life’s stories. My goal is to document more of our everyday lives this year, not just the bigger events. But how boring can that be. That’s where being a better storyteller comes into play. My mentor is Tori. She can take an everyday scene and make it look magical, like it belongs in a magazine. I mean, take a look at “The Week“. We do that stuff at our house, but I haven’t yet been able to capture it like that. Step 1, start actually taking the pictures.

One of the projects I’m joining this year is MCP Actions’ Project 52.

Every week there is a new theme and the challenge is to take a picture in the nature of that theme. Gah!!! This is where I have to get creative. The first week was “Around the House”. That shouldn’t have been hard, but I didn’t get the camera out much and it ended up being hard to pull something out of the ol’ magician’s hat that would fit the bill. Week Two was “Song Title”. Hello. There are like, eleventy million seven hundred and thirty two thousand song titles out there. It was a little easier this week to pick a picture and come up with a song title to go with it. I KNOW that wasn’t what they meant for us to do. We’re supposed to take the theme and then shoot with that in mind, not scramble at the end of the week and try to make something work…that will start happening once I get my butt in gear and feel like I’ve got this superglued face camera under control…

So, here are the two shots that I chose for the first two weeks of Project 52:

Week 1: Around the House

Yes, that’s paint peeling off of the frame. A DIY project gone wrong. Must be righted soon. Not proud of this one, but it’s all I had. I’m just glad I actually took a picture inside my house that first week.

Week 2: Song Title

Sitting on the Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding

I actually like the following one a little better, but I thought the above one would stand out better on the Project 52 Flickr Page.

Gah, that’s dark on here. Didn’t look that dark in LightRoom. Maybe I do like the 1st one better…

So, stay tuned. You’ve got 50 more of these posts coming throughout the year. Week 3’s theme is “shades of grey”, which I should be all over seeing that my iPhone’s camera settings are on nothing but black and white these days.