I’ve had the pleasure of doing a number of sessions and workshops at various conferences on Visual Storytelling, Visual Literacy, and Media Literacy. I almost always include in these sessions stories about authoring your own content and developing an observational literacy (more on this in another posting). A number of years ago doing a Project 365 was quite prevalent amongst many Education circles. I found a Project 365 to be both very challenging and invigorating for creative expression. In fact, I did it for two straight years and only missed about 45 days. If you are not familiar with the concept, you make a new photo every day for a full year. One of the biggest challenges I found was getting daily inspiration to go from the mundane images of what I am eating to more creative ways of looking at daily life. I believe a solid and fun compromise to this, is to do a Project 52 instead. During the week you try to get a few images (3-5) aligned with a theme and post your favorite at the end.
So as the saying goes “better late than never” I am sharing this post along with a doc I have put together here that can serve as your weekly inspiration for making images. The process should be fun and not a “task.” You are free to use your phone or any other camera. I encourage you to try and see things differently. Ask yourself, “If I were with 10 others right now, how many would make the exact same image I am going to,” and try to do something different. The benefits of doing this are many, and I will outline a few also in a later posting. Feel free to store your images using whatever platform you prefer, I recommend google photos. If you post them on twitter use the #project52 hashtag and you are more than welcome to tag me in them. Have fun creating!!
Note: I meant to get this posted a couple of weeks ago so feel free to start from this week or from the beginning and count this week as the 1st