Why Photography Projects Make Us Better Photographers
For many years, my photography followed a fairly random path. I'd head off somewhere with the camera and photograph whatever happened to catch my attention. And there's nothing particularly wrong with that. Wandering around with a camera and responding to what we encounter is one of photography's great pleasures.
But eventually someone gave me a simple piece of advice that fundamentally changed the way I approached my photography: Find a project.
It turned out to be one of the most useful pieces of photographic advice I've ever received.
Going Back
A photographic project doesn't have to be complicated. It might be a single species. A location. A season. A particular kind of light. A weather condition. A technique. It could even be working exclusively with one lens.
The subject of the project is almost secondary. What matters is that it gives us a reason to keep going back.
A few years ago I concentrated much of my photography around three lakes close to my home. They weren't exotic locations and none was more than about ten minutes away.
But I returned to them again and again.
Gradually, I learned where the sun would rise and set throughout the year. I discovered where the backgrounds worked at different times of day, where shadows would fall and where particular birds were likely to appear.
More importantly, I began to understand the behaviour of the birds themselves.
And something interesting happened.
Familiarity creates freedom
Initially, I made fairly conventional photographs, and that's entirely natural. When we encounter something new, most of us want to make the obvious photograph first. But once you've made that photograph, what happens next?
Repeated visits meant I no longer felt the same pressure to get the shot. If an opportunity didn't work today, there was always tomorrow. And that gave me permission to experiment.
I could try slower shutter speeds. Different exposures. Unusual compositions. I could concentrate on reflections, movement, negative space or light rather than simply trying to make another technically perfect portrait.
The photographs gradually moved from the literal towards something more interpretive.
And that, for me, is one of the great benefits of working on a project: Familiarity creates the freedom to take risks.
The extraordinary in the ordinary
There can be a tendency in wildlife photography to believe that better photographs are waiting somewhere else. Another reserve. Another country. Another species.
I've certainly been guilty of it. Yet some of my favourite photographs have been made within a few metres of my own back door.
The birds in my garden are hardly exotic, but I know that little patch of ground intimately. If extraordinary light suddenly appears, I can respond immediately. I know where the birds are likely to land, which backgrounds work and how their behaviour changes throughout the day.
Compare that with arriving somewhere completely new and encountering an exciting species for the first time.
Imagine a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Masai Mara. Faced with your first lion, are you immediately going to start experimenting wildly? Probably not. Most of us will make the photograph we know we want first, and there's nothing wrong with that, either.
But creativity often comes after the obvious photograph has already been made.
And that's where repeated access to ordinary subjects can become enormously valuable.
Knowledge changes photographs
There is another advantage to returning repeatedly to the same subjects and locations.
We stop merely looking and start noticing. We recognise behaviours before they happen. We understand how changing weather affects a location. We notice small differences in light and background that would have been invisible on our first visit.
Instead of reacting to photographs, we begin anticipating them.
That knowledge also allows us to work more sensitively around wildlife. When we understand our subjects better, we are better able to recognise their behaviour and avoid disturbing them. Animals that remain relaxed and behave naturally don't just benefit from a welfare perspective - they generally make far more interesting photographs too.
Fieldcraft and creativity are not separate things. Very often, one enables the other.
Give yourself a problem
A project doesn't necessarily need to be about a place or species. It can be a creative problem you want to solve.
Take rain, for example. For a long time I've been interested in exploring photography in wet weather. It forces me away from the beautiful early and late light I naturally gravitate towards and asks different questions:
How do I make the rain visible?
How does it affect colour?
Can movement help?
What happens if I deliberately include more habitat?
Instead of bad weather becoming a reason not to photograph, it becomes the entire reason for going out.
That's another thing projects can do remarkably well. They introduce constraints. And constraints can be extraordinarily good for creativity.
What could your project be?
Perhaps the most important thing is not to make the project too ambitious. You don't need to travel across the world or spend thousands of pounds. Quite the opposite. Look around you.
A local pond.
The birds visiting your garden.
One species you've always overlooked.
Rain.
Winter.
Black and white.
Movement.
Backlighting.
One patch of woodland.
One lens.
Give yourself something sufficiently accessible that you can return to it repeatedly, then allow it to evolve.
Don't decide in advance what the finished photographs should look like. Make the obvious images. Learn the subject. Make mistakes. Try things that don't work. Go back and try again.
Over time, individual photographs begin connecting with one another. Ideas develop. Experiments lead somewhere unexpected. And eventually you stop accumulating photographs and start creating something much more satisfying: a body of work.
Perhaps that's the real value of a photographic project. It encourages us to stop constantly searching for the next thing to photograph and instead spend a little more time discovering just how much there is to see in what we've already found.
Rob Read.
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