Going into these two days, I had absolutely no idea what I would set as my personal challenge. I was caught up in my own perfectionism and putting pressure on myself to create the perfect challenge for myself; I wanted to challenge myself in every capacity in a way I never had before. After several Dev-led brainstorms with other participants, I had a wealth of suggestions, none of which struck me as quite right.
The next morning, I stopped wasting my precious time and managed to choose a challenge that didn’t strike me as The Perfect Challenge, but would be a learning experience for me nevertheless. I set out with the reasonably flexible objective of taking 22 portraits with my fixed lens and DSLR, shooting in RAW and learning how to work with Photoshop for post production.
I spent the first day wandering around, asking other participants if I could take photos of them as they worked on their own challenges. All 22 other participants eventually consented, which made reaching 22 portraits a non-issue. I spent the second day working with Photoshop (on a computer Ben Jennings kindly lent me, as I don’t have the program myself) and finalizing each photograph.
I found that shooting with fully manual settings was somewhat challenging, but seeing as I’ve only ever worked with JPEG files before, I had to push myself significantly in order to learn and execute production of RAW photography.
I’m proud of the variety and quality of my final portraits, and plan to publish them in a set on my online photography portfolio, which I am in the process of moving to the domain I set up as part of last week’s challenges. I learned a lot and was able to help many others with their challenges by just being a friendly face and person to talk to while I photographed them, which was an unexpected benefit and a experience I was glad to have!