Capturing Summer: Personal Projects

Let me tell you a scary story.  About a month ago, I was held hostage.  By my father-in-law. In his garage.  With a 300-photograph album from the teenage years of his kids. With him explaining every. single. one.

Now, you might be thinking, “OMGEEE! Ashley! I LOVE LOOKING THROUGH OLD PHOTOS!”

Me too, but let me tell you about these.  You open the page and there are 6 photos in the spread.  In some of the pages, there would be 6 photos of my then teenage husband standing in front of a Christmas tree holding a t-shirt.  I’m pretty sure that 15% of the photos in the whole album where of my now brother-in-law blowing out candles of birthday cakes, which was totally random.

Here’s the point of me telling you this story: I loved looking at the photos of this album and seeing my husband in his awkward teenage years.  However, it made me realize how often we take the same photo over and over.  In the digital age, we don’t print as many of the duplicates as we used to when getting a roll of film developed, but so often, the taking of the photos still happens.

So I thought about this situation and how I wanted to use it when documenting our summer.  I wanted to make sure I wasn’t taking photos to simply take photos and I also wanted to make sure I wasn’t taking the same photo over and over, which would annoy everyone and make my editing load heavy.  My solution? A personal project that didn’t involve anyone but me.

On the trip with my husband to Iceland, I knew I didn’t want to force him to keep standing somewhere so I could take the snapshot, annoying him and frankly, creating images that weren’t very exciting to me. Basically, a recreation of the Christmas tree photo of his youth. I wanted to entertain myself with my photography and my final product while also spending time with him on the trip.

Personal projects are really funny, and I could honestly talk for days about them, but the short version is this: we can think they are going to be one thing and they end up something else.  Sometimes, they start only to never be completed while sometimes they take on a life of their own…art, it’s a crazy thing, right?!

So, the idea struck me sometime between leaving Chicago and landing in Reykjavik, I was going to take photos of my feet in my Birkenstock sandals (which everyone in my family hates) all around the country.  It was stupid, I totally agree, but it was so much fun.  My husband made fun of me and I laughed every time I took the photos.  Then, sometime in the second day of travel, I started taking photos of all of the street signs, which were so different than our own. 

These projects only lasted the length of my trip, and I’m still waiting for a solid project idea to knock on my door to last the length of the summer, but I’ve learned there’s no forcing the process.

If you are trying to figure out what your personal project could be, try asking yourself the following questions and see where the answers lead you:

What interests you?

How do you want to grow in your photography?

What are you doing over the next few months that could contribute to a project?

What would you like to do more of?

Most importantly, you don’t do a project for anyone else, you do it for yourself.  Your spouse might laugh as you point the camera at your Birkenstocks or roll his eyes when you ask him to put it in reverse so you can take a photo of that one sign…just go with it.

Alright, that’s it! Your summer story is going to be an awesome and a beautiful one to tell, and I’m so excited you joined me this week as I shared how I will be documenting all of our weird and amazingly wonderful chaos.  I hope you found inspiration to get the camera out, get on the other side of the camera, know when put the camera away, and get a little artsy in the midst of it all.

Happy documenting and adventuring!