The importance of having a personal project in mind when going about a familiar shoot can make your photography more rewarding. If you find yourself often heading to Brookside Gardens to shoot flowers you may begin to find it difficult to find new things to shoot. Setting a goal of a mini project or setting limitations could help. For example, perhaps you decide to shoot just plants that have dew on the leaves, or just shoot using your lens at its minimum aperture. The resulting limitation, whether it’s a specific subject or mechanical restriction will force you to see things in a new way.

I tested this theory when I went to an antique store with my Meetup group. I knew that with no limits I would end up shooting too much or perhaps freeze and shoot too little. I can become overwhelmed when faced with too many photographic options and tend to shoot less. I become more critical of what I’m framing in the viewfinder and then decide I’ve already shot the subject or it’s just not worth taking the picture.

On this trip I decided to shoot only figurines with my 40mm Micro Nikon lens. I invented a backstory of a community that keeps a lady company as they live their life in this store. The lady was represented as an old photograph taken in Victorian times. I named her Anne Teak.

Anne Teak

The community was the population of figurines that I found in all the different stalls. The challenge was to find interesting faces, good lighting, and shoot only handheld with the one lens. I also set a limitation that nothing could be moved to better light or a better location. The only movement allowed was slight rotation to angle the face towards my camera.

I shot 352 pictures that day. This included several exposures of the same thing to adjust composition and fix an errant focus point. The final picks totaled 127 pictures after editing. This is an amazing number of pictures that I’m happy with! Usually after a day of shooting I may decide I like 10-20 pictures. I firmly believe the limitations I imposed on myself and the concept of creating a personal project directly contributed to a better haul of keeper photographs. Now the task at hand is filling in the story I created in my head that morning with a better developed tale using the pictures as supplementary material. But that’s another story for later.