#30portraits30days
Last September I took on the task of photographing a new portrait for every day of the month, 30 portraits in 30 days.
A lot of my work is such that it's not immediately shareable, and I wanted to push myself to shoot a range of subjects, with some self-imposed limitations. Having just moved into a new home last year, I set up a (very small) shooting space in my office. The space being the first limitation, it was fun to try and do some different things without the usual luxury of space that a working studio offers.
Additionally, I decided to strip everything back and use an uber simple setup. Mostly one light, occasionally one extra for some fill or separation. Minimal faff and quick to go.
That being said, I took the chance to play with some other aspects of shooting. There is some free-lensing (detaching the lens from the camera while shooting), some prisming (shooting through extra lenses/glass), home made GOBOs, projections, super-slow shutters & double/triple exposures. All lots of fun to play with.
One of the trickiest parts, as you might expect, was keeping up with shooting, editing and posting an image every day. I have to be honest and admit that I did cheat a tiny bit. A few jobs meant that I wasn't able to shoot for this project on certain days, so I doubled up in advance. The edits & posting though, wasn't always easy to keep up with. I didn't get to spend as long with the selection process as I would like. Sometimes, it's nice to spend some time with the photos before letting them out into the world.
I wasn't sure how many people would be interested, but a Facebook shout-out gave me enough people to still be shooting these daily. Massive thanks to everybody that took time out to stop by. Aside from the photos, it was a great chance to catch up with a lot of people I don't see often enough.
I really enjoyed the process of shooting these, and I'm kicking off another set, shooting #52portraits one each week for 2018. Throw a new baby arriving in February, and it's probably a stupid idea, but hey, sensible ideas are boring.
