This year I am starting a “52″ project. A 52 project means that for each fully calender week I will have a different photographic theme I will try to capture in photographs, and I will post one of the better ones here on the blog. You may be familiar with “365″ projects, where you take a picture of something every day for a year, and while this is a fine idea for flexing the creative muscles the results are often pretty, well, throwaway. A 52 project gives me more time to concentrate on the week’s theme so that I can go to a little effort to get a shot worthy of keeping.
Here is one of the better shots from this week’s theme, “Cold”.
To start my project off I created a spreadsheet with the last Saturday of every week, for all of 2010. I then created three columns for ideas; “easy”, “medium” and “hard”, and I started filling them in with all sorts of thematic ideas as they occured to me. “Cold” was actually in the “medium” column, but I got a lucky break during the cold snap we had last week when some nice icicle structures started to form on my ancient wood porch in my backyard. I experimented with some macro shots, but it actually looked a lot like a running stream of water taken at a high shutter speed so I decided to back up a bit an include a little more of the surroundings. The crusty, mossy wood of my porch roof makes for an interesting contrast with the clean gray icicles, and the heavily out-of-focus background of the leafless trees in the yard adds a nice brown tone as a backdrop. I shot at about f2.8 so that I would use the lens optics near the sweet spot of sharpness, while still allowing such a shallow depth-of-field that the foreground and background would get thrown into a nice soft haze. All in all I am satisfied with it.
Next project, “Sky”.
