52 Weeks - Hitting The Ground Running

       So if you have me on Facebook or Instagram you might have noticed a little series of photos going up every week! In January I knew i would be changing jobs into a position less focused on photography, but which would give me better work/life balance and freedom to do more with my spare time. 5 weeks I am really enjoying it and being able to use my evenings and weekends to take photos has been great! 
      I wanted to keep motivated in the new year, I am into week 8 of this challenge and I have tried to do something new and different each week. The theme changes every week but on top of that I want to push myself and try new techniques and ideas. If anyone wants to join the challenge there is a group here to submit your photos and hashtags to share on social media. 

Week 1 - 52 steps from your front door. 3 exposures in and out of focus at the end of my road!

Week 2 - Sun. There was not a lot of sun in January, I shot some film but my local developers was out of action so this was what I had!

Week 3 - Black and white. Shot on my film camera on Ilford HP5, Stokes Croft graffiti makes for great high contrast photos. 

Week 4 - Landscape. My new job in Avonmouth has a nice walk I can go on on my lunch break with views of the boats! 

Week 5 - A childs laughter. This is my cousins little boy Jack who has the greatest big blue eyes and who is very hard to keep still!

Week 6 - Animals. I went to Wild Place in Bristol and caught this cheeky lemur having his lunch. 

Week 7 - The colour red. Valentines week, I was so so busy and ended up having no good ideas, this experiment with ink droplets came out rather well though.

Week 8 - Water and Ice. I froze some flowers and had fun smashing them open and playing around with composition.

Week 9 - Macro. I had a plan for this which looked horrible so in the end I just explored my living room and found this great cracked candle holder to photograph. 

Week 10 - Transport. Rather uninspired by this theme so I went to the village of Lacock and took photos of vintage bikes and lovely street stalls.

52 Steps From My Front Door

      I have loosely started a 52 week photography project. I say loosely because I am not sure how long it will stick, I have tried these things before and it doesn't usually stick! This seemed like a good one to do though because it is one photo a week, with very loose themes, and a week is probably long enough for me to get something in rather than daily.
      Anyone looking to perhaps join in on this the group I am part of is here and the different themes for each week are below:

      Week 1 is titled 52 steps from your front door, I spent my new years day feeling very lazy with a bit of a cold. I finally left my house to go for a walk and stretch my legs around 8.30pm. I took my Pentax K70 with 50mm f1.8 lens to see what I could get wandering around in the evening. 

      I started with some fairly mundane photos of the streets, the shadows on the walls lit by street lights really intrigued me. 

      I live near an army reserve centre which is well lit. I thought all the shadows were very interesting so I wanted to have a play around with the multi-exposure feature on my camera. You can blend a huge number of photos but I stuck with 2/3. I have found it works very well with high contrast subjects and strong shapes.

      Playing around more with combining different subjects, pavements and houses!

      I love the depth you get in these images, but they were all quite abstract, seeing the bokeh effect from the street lights and car headlights I wanted to see what I could do with it.

      Switching to manual focus I was able to overlay shots with in focus cars and lights with out of focus bokeh patterns. These also had quite a dreamy misty effect.

      These two are my favourite but the above didn't quite make the cut because the trees looked very soft where I had overlain the same scene defocused. My chosen image below seemed to have the nicest composition of those I took, the road leads you into the image into a sea of bokeh lights with some sharp elements poking through behind.

       I am quite happy with how this set of photos developed, next weeks theme is "sun" so I imagine I will end up with something completely different. Still, I like looking back on my process and seeing an idea develop. Is anyone else starting new projects in the new year? Feel free to share in the comments! I love to see these things!