Since the beginning of December I’ve been working on a month long photography project of photographing the same person daily for a month and it’s been an interesting and challenging project. The whole event came about as the last month of a year long project I’ve been doing that involves taking a picture every day for a year. Along the way I’ve done several theme based months to help my project along and break up the routine.
My subject for the month is Gabe, a 7-year-old that is full of energy and imagination. My approach was to find out from his mom Tina just what all Gabe was into. We compiled a list of photo ideas that made up about 25 of the days in December and are filling in the remaining days with pictures that come up we didn’t think about in advance, and a couple have already done so. After compiling this list the shooting began.
We try to let Gabe decide what picture situation he’d like to do on a particular day since I wanted it to be a somewhat fun time for him as I thought that it would help capture a more natural look to the photographs that I shoot. Putting your subject at ease when shooting goes a long way at capturing images that show their true personality and I think that allowing him to pick the theme each day has done that for Gabe. Of course there’s some days I pick the subject as there’s some things I think are important to show what the life of a 7-year-old is like that perhaps he’d just as soon not show, such as doing his homework.
I try to keep the time spent each day on the photo shoot short as the attention span for a 7-year-old can start to dwindle as the minutes tick by and so I don’t want to drag the shooting out longer than necessary.
I plan on publishing my first photography book as a result of this project so stay tuned.
