Creating a Personal Photography Project: From Concept to Execution

Photo from “The Dark Days of the Soul” by photographer Dasha Pears.

Taking on a personal project is the next level. It makes you treat photography as an art form. Like in any art, you first start with one-offs, singles, or short stories, and only then approach writing a novel. And this is how I invite you to treat your personal project, as writing a novel, as opposed to snapping unconnected stories here and there.

Don’t be discouraged right away though, your project doesn’t have to be “War and Peace”, only if you really really want to.

Table of Contents

The Big WHY

So why take on a project? Many reasons:

1. To challenge oneself

You have developed some skill in your photography craft, now what? Can you connect your snaps into a single connected narrative and show the world more of who you are? Can you commit to something bigger, longer, and more demanding than just picking up your camera for a day and sharing the results in a few hours? Taking on a personal project requires some dedication, not everyone is ready for it, are you?

2. To make a statement

If you have some theme that deeply concerns you, a personal project might be a fantastic way to share your viewpoint with the world or even call viewers to at least open their minds to your ideas, if not take immediate action.

A collection of images connected in a single narrative will have a much more powerful impact than a single shot. Your viewers will also subconsciously read the signal that since the topic is so important to you that you’ve been able to dedicate a lot of time and effort to covering and exploring it, it might be worth their attention too.

3. To get self-help and self-knowledge

A personal project can be a way for you to deal with something important in your life, like a form of closure: you pour your thoughts, experiences, and emotions into your images and let go. By working on some topic over a period of time, you also get a chance to explore yourself: why do you like or hate the topic so much? Why does this issue seem so important to you?

4. To apply for a contest/exhibition

Many of us do need a magical kick/call from the outside to get things going, so this reason is as good as any other.

Types of Personal Photography Projects

All personal projects can be divided into two types.

1. Ongoing prolonged projects

Ongoing prolonged projects may reflect your steady long-term mission or interest and grow while your vision develops. Those with time can be turned into books or touring shows.

One prominent example of this is The Humans of New York by Brandon Stanton, a photographer who decided to create an exhaustive catalog of the city’s inhabitants while taking portraits of 10,000 New Yorkers.

Portraits by photographer Brandon Stanton for “The Humans of New York.”

Another such example is the project by Kristina Varaksina, who takes self-portraits to document and reflect on different states of her life.

Self-portraits by photographer Kristina Varaksina.

2. Condensed (time-limited) shorter projects

Condensed shorter projects are completed within a limited time frame set by you, the artist; sometimes those are called photo essays.

An example of such a project can be Home Work by Katerina Belkina – a project exploring the realities of women-artists.

Photos from “Home Work” by photographer Katerina Belkina.

Another example is Stillness by Valentina Loffredo, exploring the healing process that leads us from a trauma back into life, in a visual-narrative sequence of eleven photographs.

Photos from “Stillness” by photographer Valentina Loffredo.

If it’s your first personal photography project ever, it’s generally better to start small. A shorter (3-6 images) photo essay is much more likely to be finished. Finalizing your first personal project quest will give you confidence and satisfaction, and that in turn will allow you to take on bigger and more ambitious projects next time. That’s why new authors usually start with short stories and do not take on whole novels right away.

Before You Start

Choose a topic

Even a small personal project might be intimidating if you’re just starting out. This is exactly why you need to choose a topic that both deeply resonates with you, and is easy to explore technically.

Questions to ask yourself before you start

Why is this topic interesting to me?

Unless you find a few valid reasons why the theme is important, you might either not go through with it, or the project might not feel yours at the end and you might want to distance yourself from the whole thing, as though it has nothing to do with you.

What do I generally like or dislike about it?

Answers to this question will give you the initial clues of what you’ll put in your shots: objects, people, places, times of day, lighting, etc.

Does it seem realistic to take on this particular topic?

Pre-access your resources: time, money, equipment, help. Then let yourself be guided by general common sense, keeping those in mind. Does it make sense to take on a project involving shooting 20 studio portraits, if you don’t have lights or easy access to a studio? Can you complete a time-consuming project if you already have four kids and three jobs? Wouldn’t it be wiser to choose something that will ask for no more than 20 minutes per day, or could even be completed within a single long shooting session?

What’s going to connect my story?

Your project needs to be coherent, so it’s better to understand what will support that coherency early on: light, color, subjects, composition, or something else? Oftentimes, just one element is not enough, and several elements need to be consistent to support and convey your main idea. If your project will include over 6 shots, you might also think of strategies to keep your viewer interested. Those will be of great help when you curate your photos for any type of presentation: either sending this presentation to a contest as electronic slides or submission, publishing the photos in a magazine, or putting them on a wall at a gallery.

Choose a style

Select your visual language early on and stick with it, you can’t mix styles within one project. Generally mixing street photography with staged fine art portraits, and still-lifes in one series will confuse your viewers and the body of work will appear incoherent.

Create rules

Rules might sound boring, but they make your life and work easier, they help you focus. Your rules for a project can include:

• Lighting
• Location (indoor/outdoor)
• Color (colorful, monochromatic, black&white)
• Composition
• Equipment being used (especially your optics)
• Editing style

For example, in this project The Dark Days of the Soul, my rules were: indoor location with a white background (a wall in my home studio), minimalistic composition, monochromatic color (close to black and while in this selection), using paper as my main prop, natural light.

In another project of mine, Plastic Souls the rules were different: bright saturated colors, outdoor locations, props made of industrial materials:

Planning is Everything

Create an outline

Outline how your images would look like, and see what’s necessary for your execution. Do you need to…

• Scout for locations?
• Find assistants or models?
• Get props or equipment?
• Check your lighting?
• Understand how each shot has to be made so that your editing is smooth?

Schedule your shoots

Will you do it all in one day/shoot/location? Will it take you a few days/weeks/months to get all the images in place? Even if your project is very small and does not involve other people, you’d be much more likely to go through with it if the shoots were built in your calendar. If you’re working with a team (even with a team of two: you and a friend) the schedule is crucial.

Plan to fail

Try to imagine what can go wrong and prevent you from shooting there and then: empty battery, dead memory cards, people being sick, and come up with plan B, before your plan A breaks.

Making it Happen

Ok, so you are in the field and on location, you are ready to start your exploration, and now you can relax your mind and follow your artistic intuition. You have primed your mind to focus on the important things, now just flow and have fun with it!

Things to remember and not stress about

Try options: Generally, the more diverse footage you have, the better. Sometimes your original idea falls short of what comes to you on the spur of the moment and it’s fine! Don’t limit yourself to the initial plan, make variations and if you’re working in a team try (within limits) their suggestions too.

Embrace changes on set: Life happens, and often, you need to adapt to changing weather conditions, people not showing up, locations being unavailable, etc. It’s not a reason to cancel, with all the preps you’ve done, try modifying the initial idea or coming up with a new solution on the spot. You’ll be surprised how the final result might turn out so much better with an unexpected change in place, than the initial idea that you had in your mind. Everything happens for the better.

Check your coherence

With each new shot added to the final collection (if you work within a few days or weeks), see if your idea is coming through and works well with the other images (both ready and planned to be shot soon). Does it fit in the whole body of work? Does it feel true to you? Do you need to correct this shot or the entire project idea?

Know when and where to stop

The beauty of every story becomes more prominent once the story comes to an end. Nothing is worse than a forever-work-in-progress first personal photography project. Once your work is done, congratulate yourself and pat yourself on the back. You’re one of few people who can actually go through with something they started!

Evaluate Results

Once you have completed your project, take some time to look at your images together and try to distance yourself from your work. Yes, it might be incredibly hard! This is where trusted friends and mentors may come in handy. However, not all of us are lucky enough to have those, and even if you do, you still need to assess your own results personally. Have you succeeded in conveying your original thought or message? What do you like about the series? What could be done better? Can you refine/retake some of your shots to make them fit the original message better?

What have you learned? How have you changed? Have you done your absolute best?

Don’t be afraid to answer “no” to this last one. Answering all the previous questions and doing your homework will help you do better next time. Visual storytelling is a muscle, if you exercise it, it ends up not only improving your life but will also allow you to tackle more challenging topics next time.

Let It Go

Treat showing your project to the world as one of the stages of working on it, the final one. Even the shiest people among us would take on a project to share the work with others, often in the hope of connecting and maybe even influencing people.

Whether you share your work on your website, Instagram, or in a gallery, think once again of the impact you want your work to have and the transformation (even the tiniest one) you want your viewer to leave with. Put yourself in your viewers’ shoes. That’ll help you come up with the best way to introduce your project.

Once your work is out there give it a chance to live its own life – let your viewers decide what the impact is. Don’t try to demand one type of reaction. In fact, if you get mixed reactions – it means that your work hit the nerve and, therefore, is valuable.

Pro Tips

• Journal to find topics that interest you. Creating a truly original personal photography project will demand self-trust and self-knowledge – if you know yourself well, then you have a good chance of creating something that’s yours and not someone else’s. Journaling is a great form of self-reflection, use it creatively to channel your personality into your photography.
• Sketch your future shots, especially, if you are working with staged photography. You don’t need to be a Michelangelo to sketch your images, they can be much worse than what you drew when you were 5, their purpose is not to impress people, but for you to understand the composition of each shot and help you prepare how this shot needs to be taken.
• When you ask for and receive feedback on your work: only ask someone who will tell you the absolute truth. False praise or professional jealousy will do you no good. At the same time, be wholeheartedly prepared to hear things you will not like, and don’t get defensive right away. Again, distance yourself from your work, and even though this is a personal project, and you’re the master of your theme, there might still be room for growth and improvement.
• With each new project try to take more risks and do something “dangerous” and out of your comfort zone. You don’t necessarily need to become a war journalist right away, for many of us talking to a stranger on the street (or even online) is already a big step forward.

About the author: Dasha Pears is an award-winning photographer based in Helsinki, Finland. Dasha uses the instruments of surrealism, minimalism, color, photography, and digital manipulation to tell surprising visual stories with a twist. You can find more of Pears’s work on her website, Facebook, and Instagram.