Photography is an act of bearing witness. This month, four prompts push you to photograph with presence and intention: other people, overlooked places, traces of the past, and a full day of your own life.
Photograph someone or something that exists in plain sight but goes unnoticed. The overlooked person on a busy street, the building everyone passes without looking up, the object that has been in the same spot so long it has become invisible.
Your job is to make the viewer see it for the first time.
Make a portrait where the subject meets the lens directly. A person, an animal, even a statue.
Something shifts when a subject acknowledges the camera. Sit with that tension and decide what you want it to mean.
Photograph the trace of something, not the thing itself. A worn path, an empty chair, a window with condensation, a meal half eaten.
Show what was there without showing it directly.
Choose one day this month and document it fully, from the moment you wake up until right before you fall asleep. Aim for at least one photo an hour.
You are not trying to make it look good. You are trying to make it true.
March sits mid-stride, not quite one thing, not yet another. Work with the threshold, the almost, the incomplete. Lean into the ambiguity.
Find something that has not finished becoming what it is going to be. A bud that has not opened. A building half-demolished. A face mid-expression.
The incompleteness is the whole point. Fight every instinct to wait for it to resolve and shoot it as-is.
Doorways, shorelines, the edge of a shadow, the moment before someone walks through a door.
A threshold implies both sides at once, and your job is to put that tension in the frame.
Find a scene that refuses to be one thing and do not try to fix it in post. Dawn or dusk, joy or grief, abandoned or just quiet.
Ambiguity is welcome here.
Steam off a coffee. Chalk on a sidewalk before it rains. That look someone gives right before they realise you are photographing them.
Find something small and impermanent and make it last.
As the days get shorter, light becomes limited and more intentional. Work with those conditions using motion, stillness, and unconventional light sources to shape meaning. Pay attention to what changes when the light fades. That is where the interesting stuff lives.
Light trails, blurred commuters, soft water. Use a slow shutter speed to show motion. You will need a steady hand, tripod, or solid surface.
Can not control your shutter speed? Think creatively about other ways to suggest movement.
Some of the most interesting light comes from unconventional places, a bonfire, a TV set, car headlights.
The main light source should come from something other than the sun or standard light bulbs.
One artificial light source only. A table lamp or phone flashlight will do just fine.
Subject is up to you, no cheating with multiple sources.
Interpret as you will. Still life the genre. Life being still. Life still going on.
However you read this, you do you. The ambiguity is intentional.
Four prompts chosen to help you feel motivated, engaged, and intentional about the year ahead. All focused on helping you identify how to make the most of the project.
Think about what you want to achieve this year. Set a goal and make a photograph which demonstrates it.
You will revisit this midway through and at the end of the year.
Make a photo that shows what you love. Be as concrete or abstract as you like.
Highlight what makes this your passion so a viewer can interpret your relationship to it.
Find something you interact with every day and photograph it from at least ten different angles. Choose the best one.
What is mundane to you may be fascinating to another.
Show where you are in your photographic journey. Wildlife, portraits, street, sport, photograph what you like, how you normally would.
You have free range here.