Jeremy Brooks

2008 Challenge from Jeremy Brooks on Vimeo.

The 2008 Challenge was a challenge. One photo per week, documenting my community. Committing to shoot the same theme every week was not always easy. Some weeks I had no idea what I was going to shoot. Some weeks I just didn’t want to shoot. But I managed complete it. Here are some things I learned from the experience:

1. Planning is essential

Doing some research about my community and planning to shoot specific things greatly helped in completing the project. I found a list of Richmond fire stations and a list of public art in Richmond. These lists provided an abundance of subject matter. Each week I picked one of the items on the list to shoot.

2. Don’t wait until the last minute

It was much easier to pick a subject and attempt to shoot it at the beginning of the week. If the subject was no longer there (as was the case for some of the public art I tried to shoot), I could pick another subject and shoot it later in the week.

3. Make the project public

Posting the shots on flickr, zooomr, and my blog gave me incentive to complete the project once I had started it. The shots appeared at photochallenge.org as well.

4. Tag the photos and make a set

Tagging each photo with ‘2008challenge’ made it possible to see everybody’s 2008 Challenge photos. In addition, it made it simple to automatically add my photos to a 2008 Challenge set. Flickr does not have the ability to create sets automatically based on tags, but you can use SmartSetr to do it.

Some of the project photos are not very inspired. Some are quite boring. Some I am really not happy with at all. But I posted them anyway, and I am happy with the project as a whole.
I’m really looking forward to the 2009 Challenge, and seeing what the completed project will look like at the end of next year. Can you do the 2009 Challenge as well? Why not give it a shot? It will be interesting to see a whole pool of photos from the year!