2020
Lockdown
Photography
Challenge

I loved the experience of my first Photography Challenge project, and by the end of 2019 I had already decided that I was going to repeat it in 2020 – but this time with improvements.

Obviously a 30-day theme doesn’t cover the entirety of every month, but I also decided to make things more interesting by doing away with the repetitive monthly set. Instead, I compiled a very long list of a broad range of subjects, some of which in themselves were open to interpretation. To choose a subject each day, I used a roulette wheel app called Tiny Decisions. The wheel could be set not to repeat results until all were used, and then was reset for the next cycle. At the beginning of the year I had 40 or so options, but I was continuously adding more as I thought of them, and by the end the app was loaded with 91 subjects.

This would be really fun and completely random! I loved the moment every morning when I spun the wheel, and waited for the surprise subject of the day.

Of course, pretty early on the world had another surprise, and that was the pandemic. I lived in Melbourne, one of the world’s cities most kept in strict lockdown for nearly two years. That was the extra degree of difficulty applied over the year, but I always enjoy a challenging brief. There are only two overt references to the pandemic – although perhaps other photos of eerily empty streets are an indicator as well.

As before, I used the Hipstamatic app to apply effects in post-editing, and I did not repeat any of the combinations of the previous year. However, some of effects I deliberately created, such as the Autochrome effect I tried hard to emulate, as in the banner image above.

View the individual monthly galleries below.