I’ve done photography the wrong way

I’ve done photography the wrong way forever. I am a haphazard photographer. And even worse at organizing my photographs. I don’t mean I take bad photographs, I just don’t have a plan. I go out and hope for the best. I hope I find cool shit to photograph. Why is that wrong you may ask? There is no plan.

I’ve done photography with a plan. The featured photograph I took almost six years ago. The concept was 1960s. The session was planned and it took months to find each element in the photo.

We had a whole series of different settings.

Most of the items, I still have available.

This was one of the few where the entire session was a theme. Most of the time, I just get going and hope for the best. Even with models or portraits. I have decided, through careful review of my photographs that there is litte central theme to a session.

A number of years ago I started a project on rural grain mills, feed stores, and elevators.

The project is still ongoing but I have allowed it to cool so to speak.

When it comes to organizing, yikes! My orgainization of my catalog is horrendous. I’ve improved on keywording but as far a collections and grouping. It’s no wonder I can’t put together a photo project to publish.

Why am I confessing this to you all? I suspect I’m not alone. Keywording, building collections, planning projects and keeping track of them is boring and tedious. Once you have tens of thousands of photographs in this haphazard manner it is laborious to correct.

Moving forward, start today to plan projects, collect assests to use in those projects, orgainze your assests to help put together your collections. I am, I’m starting today. I’m going to build my photo project list and stop shooting hapharzardly hoping to find that “perfect” image. I’ve decided that images standing alone may be nice, what makes photography best is projects and collections. As photographic artists we are in a much better position to tell stories and convey concepts through collections rather than merely invdividual pieces of work.