Week 1

2012 is here and even though I don't make resolutions I've been making a few goals. Goals for life, for the year, for the semester and even for the next few weeks before my birthday. I was talking to a photo friend of mine and we both want to be more artsy this year and have a lot more photo days in our lives. So I've decided to do 3 things:

1. Take photos of one specific idea, thing, place or whatever each week of this year.
2. Blog about each of them, because one day I will wish i had blogged more.
3. Finish with one large, cohesive project that I will title later, but for now call it the 52 week project.

My photo mentor gave a few of us a project to do over the holidays but I honestly didn't spend much time on it so today I revisited what he told us to do. He told us something about how Beethoven wrote about the importance of focusing on just a few aspects at a time while creating great things. We have this whole world full of stuff to choose from and if you go out into it to capture just anything you will most likely come back with a bunch of crap. This is very true in photography. I never knew it, but to make great photographs I need a few specific things to focus on in order to know exactly what it is I want to photograph.

Shadows.Today I went out to find the greatest shadows I could. When you're not really looking, you don't notice how many shadows there are in the world. But when you think about it you can find some really great ones. Shadows can come in the exact shape of the object making it or they are often times distorted, which makes a shadow really interesting. Light is THE most important thing for photographs. Lights make shadows and sometimes, really amazing shadows.