Basically to improve your photography skills you pick a specific subject or photographic area to explore for each week for a year. I hope to eventually reach a rate of one subject per week. So far I've completed part of one subject and it has been a month so we?ll have to see if I can pick up steam.
Freeplane mind map
I decided to add a bit of structure that I learned on the "Let's talk Photography" podcast that I subscribe to that is published by a wonderful Irish fellow, Bart Busschots. The particular podcast dealt with projects (see link below).
Bart suggested following a five stage process for projects. The stages are,
Research
Planning
Shooting
Processing
Critiquing (actually Bart used "Editing" but I thought that was confusing)
If you want to understand this method, I suggest you listen to the podcast. Bart can explain the details far better than I can. You then follow the process and publish the results with a narrative describing each step in the process. In order to keep organized, I use a mind map to capture what subject areas I want to explore and to keep notes on each week's shoot. I also keep the five process steps handy so I can remind myself of the process. If you are interested in mind maps, there are many applications out there to choose from. I use Freeplane, it is a free java based app that runs on any platform and it's functionality is extensible via scripting. You can find Freeplane at www.freeplane.org
In each week's photos you can view a larger version of the photo and get technical details by clicking on the photo. Click anywhere away from the photo to return to normal viewing.
