2019 Photography Challenge

I take a lot of photos every day, as do many of us. I’m always keeping an eye out for inspiring, interesting or amusing sights. I already have an ongoing project, the Lost Collection which I first began 13.5 years ago: I looking for ‘lost things’ to photograph and add to my collection which! However, towards the end of 2018, I started thinking about a more purposeful and short-term photographic project.

I had been seeing a lot of monthly photo challenges floating around on social media, and I decided that could be a fun thing to do. However, none of the shared lists I had seen appealed to me wholly, so I wrote my own 30-day list that I intended to roll over each month. In addition, since I would be using my phone, I would use my favourite camera app, the Hipstamatic, and apply a different combination of lens, film and flash effects to each monthly set.

Some of the subjects I chose included obvious cues: self-portrait, nature, urban and domestic environments, clouds, sunsets/sunrises, animals etc, but I also included some prompts that would encourage lateral thinking, such as time, inspiration, nostalgia, literary. One of my prompts was the phrase, ‘Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue’ – quite broad, but sadly I managed only one ‘borrowed’ item! In November I even added an extra degree of difficulty and used fashion as a general theme for the entire month, which was fun.

With 33,000 photos on my phone, I only recently managed the Herculean labour of downloading my camera roll in its entirety, and finally finished collating the last few months. You can read a bit more and view the entire portfolio here – each month is separated into its own gallery.

Riso x Retro

So Not A Princess is Moving!