Earlier this year, I heard about the Dogwood 52 challenge, created by Dale over at Dogwood Photography from a friend, and was absolutely psyched. Sure, a planned photo a week was going to take effort, but what better way to grow as a photographer? As this post title suggests, it took me all of four weeks to flop at this.
A new job isn't really a good excuse, but it's part of it. The bigger issue is, I haven't really figured out how to fit in photography with the rest of my life. But it's a passion, and something I love doing in addition to my full time job, so I will trundle along and piece it together! I figure this challenge should be a blog series, so here's a recap of weeks 1-4, followed by the latest:
Week 1: Self Portrait
I didn't get the composition right AT ALL on this one, but I was so excited to do a self-portrait and get the focus right at a relatively shallow DoF with a manual lens that I didn't really care :)
Week 2: Traditional Landscape
Week 3: Red
I was able to get weeks 2 and 3 in the same weekend at Yosemite - so I cheated a bit but who can resist the wonderland that's Yosemite in the winter?
Week 4: Potrait: Headshot
This was the last one from the challenge that I posted, at the end of February. I did get weeks 5-7 in the next couple of weeks but didn't end up posting them. I wasn't entirely sure about my shots - which is a silly reason to not post them. So here's to getting back on the horse and seeing this challenge through!
Week 5: Landscape: Black & White
I absolutely love B&W architectural shots and I hope I did San Francisco justice with this one!
Week 6: Candy
That week was the hardest so far - I saw some absolutely brilliant shots set up and captured and I already knew mine was going to fall short. My style to date has been more photojournalistic, but this week told me I was going to have to get out of my comfort zone and get creative. Good to have learnings for future weeks, right?
Week 7: Faceless
This was also a toughie at first - "Tell someone's story without showing their face". This to me implied that it had to be captured in the moment. Luckily, while coming back from a second trip to Yosemite (where I got an amazing view of Horsetail Falls at sunset), we stopped by one of the several almond tree orchards and I got this shot.
I'm definitely excited to go through the rest of this challenge, and though I'm behind, I'm going to stick to doing these one week at a time for the most part. Stay tuned for Week 8!