Numbers Project

13

Over the past year I pretty much abandon blogging, and to a large extent photography. I still took pictures of the family and while on vacation, but I didn’t spend much time just taking pictures. I tried to get into the August 2010 Photo Challenge, but only managed 19 shots. 2010 was an off year all around for me. This year I’m trying to get back into shooting more photos for myself. I was hoping www.photochallenge.org would have some good themes to keep me motivated, but it looks like the site is on hiatus. (I sincerely hope new challenges come up soon.)

I decided I needed to come up with my on themes and Numbers is one I’ll be working on all year. Numbers are all around us and define much of our lives. We see them in everywhere we go and in almost everything we do. I’ve decided to try to take photos of as many numbers as possible this year, focusing on numbers below 1000.  I came up with a few guidelines for myself:

  • No addresses unless it’s a really compelling shot. It’s just too easy to get numbers from homes or businesses, and I want this to be a little challenging.
  • No repeating the same subject. I could take a lot of number shots of speed limit signs, but that will get boring fast. Part of the challenge is to find different subjects as well as numbers.
  • Don’t use the same number twice. So far this hasn’t been a problem, but I did add two shots of the number 4 to the set. One was taken long before I started this project, but was the kind of shot I want to do.
  • Try to get just a number by itself, without other words or other numbers. For example, a keyboard has numbers, but it’s hard to get each number by itself, although it could make an interesting macro. I’m not to let this limit my shots, but the point is to focus on numbers.

So far I’ve taken nine shots for this project this year and have started a set on Flickr. I’ll add to it as much as possible throughout the year.