I get asked a lot — “What makes you want to do this?” or “Why would you do this if you aren’t getting paid for it?”, generally my answer is — “Just for the sake of it” but let me expand on that a little more. To me the value of this project is completely inherent in the act of doing it or, more importantly, the act of completing it to a level of quality with which I am happy — I did it to prove to myself that I could.

I decided from the start I wanted to really make these shots stand out as a series; I wanted to give them all something that tied them together. I love film, & the idea that a single frame can really tell a story so I thought I’d try to achieve that cinematic feel with well thought out composition & post processing. Also, being a designer with a passion for well set type I wanted to add a typographical twist to the shots — hopefully carry on the story telling a little bit.

I approached this project as I would anything else in my life — diagonally. I scribbled down any ideas I had for photos into a Moleskine diary, along with any events, words, people, anything I could think of that might help. Laying it out like this made it a lot easier to get a clear picture of the whole project in my head. I could see the days where I was going to need to do a bit of extra organisation or need to ask a friend for help.

I also wanted to make an effort to document the more interesting setups in the series. Every photo that used off camera lighting has strobist info in the description & I started adding setup photos, which a lot of you will know I already add to quite a few of my prior photos. I also did about thirteen setup videos, a new thing for me; my iPhone 4 made producing them pretty easy & the quality was good. You can check out all the videos on my Vimeo page.

I always suck at summing up projects; I really struggle to step back & look at the project objectively to assess what I’ve achieved. I am probably overly self critical & I rarely like anything I produce for more than 2 hours after I’ve done it. I guess that’s got something to do with why I put together some statistics. I know that most of them are meaningless, especially Explore, but it makes my creativity & skill level quantifiable; my mind likes that.

Regardless of how I feel I have done, I enjoyed the project a lot. I put more pressure on myself this time than in previous photographic challenges & I think I responded well — I only thought about killing myself a few times. So I guess in that respect the project is a massive success? Yeah… cool.

Statistics

As I said above, in some bizarre way, statistics help me quantify my ability as a creator of photographic images. Not on a personal “Do I like this image?” kinda level but more on a global “How well has this image gone down” sorta thing. I put together loads of stats from this project & thought I would share some of them. If you’re as geeky as me you might enjoy them. I wish I had time to make a more in depth info graphic, as theres tonnes of data! But hey, I’ve got a million other things I should be doing!

The Site — FiftyofFifty.co.uk

I built this simple site to showcase the project on it’s own platform. Flickr is great for people to follow & interact with a project in real time but once it’s over, it’s very easy for a project to get buried. I built the site in HTML5 with some sexy CSS3 & also added a really nice iPhone optimised interface for the iPhone, including high res retina display graphics. Oh & if you add the site to your home screen you’ll see a rather sexy icon that John O’Nolan designed for me, what a guy!

So What’s Next?

What a good looking question, thanks for asking — but I’m not telling yet! I’ve got some stuff to catch up on that I put off to do this project, including the next ‘How I Shoot’ post, but don’t worry, my flickr will not be neglected. I have loads in my edit pile to get through & I can never last long without taking a photo or two! But more to the point I have already started planning the next project… it’ll be something a little different but hopefully just as enjoyable as this has been for people. Stay tuned.

The Giveaway!!

Yep! I am giving away a full set of fifty 7″ by 5″ prints from the project to just one person! In fact they are the exact ones I used in my final photo! Cool huh? To be in with a chance of winning all you need to do is follow meon twitter & tweet:

Read about @RickNunn’s Fifty of Fifty photo project & you could win fifty beautiful prints – http://bit.ly/fiftyoffifty

The winner will be picked at random & announced here on the 1st of September 2010.

Competition now closed — the winner is… Rob Barrett!

I am 1 of 5 people on a shortlist of bloggers, the winner of which gets to go to New York by the Vtravelled Blog next week! How cool would that be!

I would really love the opportunity to shoot the streets of New York & I think we all agree my new photo site could do with a New York set. :P

So… what do I need from you? Just 1 tweet. Yep, that’s all I need. If you could tweet something like:

"I think @RickNunn should go to New York #vblogger"

then that would do it and I would be extremely grateful.

I know you guys will help so thanks in advance!

You can only nominate one blogger. Multiple tweets for the same blogger will not be counted. Re-tweeted votes will not be counted. If you have a protected Twitter account, your vote will not be counted.

When 6pm rolled around I don’t think any one was expecting the amount of people that turned up! It was nuts, all the Droplets sold out in 58 minutes! Fifty Fifty was jam packed as was the gallery downstairs.

Anyway, the real reason you are here is to see the photos I took right? Yeah, I thought so. I took around 200 which I will try and get up in some sort of gallery this week, but for now here are some of my favourite shots.

I had an awesome day, & it was good to put some faces to names, I didn’t manage to say hi to everyone but it’s not personal, I was busy taking photos! :P

Keep your eyes on my flickr for more uploads.

• Droplet Launch, Bristol

  Saturday 6th February

  The talented Mr Strange (aka Jam Factory) is launching his second series of the awesome Droplets! I’ll be down to shoot some artist portraits, promo shots as well as generally shooting the launch. If you are there come say hi to me & expect to be shot!

• xBox Man Date

  Sunday 7th February

  I’ll be having some quality Call of Duty time on the xBox with John O’Nolan on Sunday, if anyone else fancies pwning some n00bs with us then let me know.

  I had to include this to stop John from crying like a little girl.

• Photo Shoot

  Sunday 7th February

  I’m doing a shoot with my friend Leah again! Woo! She is absolutely one of my favourite models to photograph such, a natural in front of the camera. The plan at the moment is to do a moody night time fashion style shoot, hopefully that will work out well for me.

  You may have seen some of the shots I’ve done with her before. If not go look. The shoot is for part two of my ‘How I Shoot’ posts, so keep your eyes peeled for that in the not too distant future & if you haven’t read part one, you can do that here.

• My Birthday

  Wednesday 10th Feb

  Yep, I’ll be turning 27! I’m not one for making a big deal out of my birthday, they are pretty irrelevant so I’ll just be spending some time with Kym & having a quiet meal with the family. Oh I’ll also be hitting Coffee Aroma, which is my usual coffee hang out & the only place to get a real coffee in Lincoln!

• Speak The Web, Leeds

  Thursday 11th February

  Yep I’m heading up to the Leeds leg of Speak The Web, it should be great, I’m really looking forward to hearing the likes of Andy Clarke, Chris Mills & Stuart Smith. As well as meeting up with interweb friends Sam Hardacre & Oliver Ker.

  I’m going to head over to Leeds plenty early so I can go grab a coffee from Opposite Café (Blenheim Terrace) (and yes I know it’s a trek out of town) first & take some photos of the city. I haven’t been to Leeds for quite a few years but from what I remember it’s quite pretty. Anyone else hitting this event?

• London Baby

  Thursday 12-14th February

  Weekends in London are fun, especially with Kym. We are planning on hitting 4 of the best indie coffee shops while we are down:

  • Tina, We Salute You (King Henry’s Walk )
  • Monmouth Coffee Company (Monmouth Street, Covent Garden)
  • LJ Coffee House (Winnett Street, Soho)
  • Nude Espresso (Hanbury Street)

  There will also be plenty of sushi consumed & as always photographs taken! If you’re in London that weekend too, let me know. We’ll get coffee or sushi! (As long as you aren’t some sort of a mental freak!)

What’s everyone else doing this week? Let me know in the comments!

On the 2nd of January 2009, being freshly paid for a freelance project, I wandered down to my local branch of LCE to see what they had on offer. Lucky for me they had just the camera I wanted, a Canon 450D with the 18-55 kit lens, I also managed to get them to throw in a Canon 430ex Speedlite for a very reasonable price. It wasn’t until this day that it crossed my mind to do a 365 project. I thought it would be a great way to keep the camera in my hand & speed up the learning process. Conveniently I had been taking some photos the day before on my FX-30, meaning I could run my 365 from January 1st to December 31st (It just felt right).

I instantly fell in love with my new 450D, she went every where with me & it didn’t take me long to start picking up extra bits for her, like the Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens & grip. Around February I found myself getting a hunger for a film camera, I got a 35mm Fisheye Lomo for my birthday & on the 20th of February I picked up a 1983 Canon AE-1 from a camera stall at a local market. Shooting film is fantastic, I realised how much it makes you value each photo. I think I soon translated that, at least to some degree, to my digital photography.

It also didn’t take me long to get interested in off camera flash, aka Strobist photography. I’m a bit of a control freak, so being able to set up all the light in a scene really appealed to me. But holy shit, that stuffs confusing for a n00b! Seriously, I spent hours & hours reading EVERYTHING I could find on the internet trying to make sense of any of it. There is certainly a lot more information about it on the web now than there was 10 months ago. The first product to aid my strobist adventure was the Canon ST-E2, which is an infrared transmitter capable of firing any of the current range of Canon speedlites while retaining the ETTL system. I quickly found that the ST-E2 (That name just rolls off the tongue) was quite limiting, being infrared it relies on line-of-sight & it doesn’t have a huge amount of range.

So I did some more research & got some radio transmitters, these gave me range but meant that I had to run any flashes on manual. That was ok, at this point I was already making sure I was taking every photo with my camera on full manual. Manual equals control, Rick likes that, in fact now when I use my ST-ET I use the flash on manual just to get that extra level of control. Light stands & light modifiers were the next logical step for me, umbrellas made the most sense as they were easy to get hold of & affordable. Since then I’ve had quite a few different umbrellas but recently I picked up some pretty large umbrella boxes which I really love. They like a softbox, but in umbrella form — awesome.

At the beginning of June an old family friend, who just happens to be a photographer, invited me out to a studio shoot he was doing. He also said that if brought someone pretty there would be time to set up the studio lights & shoot them. I knew just the person, my friend Leah, she’d done some modelling in past & one of her friends is a make up artist. They both came along & we had a really great time. I learnt loads & got some nice shots. It really whet my appetite for portrait photography – who would have thought, someone as antisocial as me would love taking photos of people as much as I do.

I never really intended to shoot live music, the thought hadn’t even entered my mind, until my friend Sarge rang me about Groomfest (An annual Lincoln music festival). He was quite insistent that I would shoot it… & you don’t say no to Sarge. It was a two day event at a local pub, a big marquee was set up in the car park with a stage. Some 25 bands performed – I shot them all. For my first time shooting music I was pretty happy with myself, or as happy as I get, I actually really enjoyed it & since have shot quite a lot of music locally.

About two thirds of the way through the year things started to become very hard work so I tried to give the project more structure by mixing in smaller projects, the first of which was Project 50 which I did with one of my bimbo gal pals we even made a website after we completed it – Fifty Of Fifty. I also did a week of self portraits. Which was harder work than you might think, not only was it a challenge to set the camera up, with lighting, focus etc… but it was also a challenge for me to step to the other side of the lens, I wasn’t the biggest fan of having my photo taken but now I’m pretty ok with it.

I also started a non time line based set which I am calling “Quotos“. I love photography & I love typography combining the two made a lot of sense. I was planing on doing a Quoto for my final photo, but it didn’t work out. A set I will be continuing to expand, at a steady rate, for the foreseeable future.

In October I made the decision to swap my Canon 450D to a prosumer level Canon 50D. Don’t get me wrong the 450D is a great camera & I would recommend it to anyone getting into photography but I felt I would benefit from the upgrade. The 50D has a much better sensor, handles low light better, bla bla bla the list goes on & I am really happy with it, well until I can get my hands on a 5D MkII.

The whole project has been incredibly hard work, motivation has probably been my biggest enemy in this. It is so hard to take a consistantly good photo day after day, it’s even harder to come up with that photo. My 2nd has been time – when I am busy with work, or have other things on it’s amazing how quickly the day can escape you. Sometimes I ended up with a slightly sub par photo, but I still somehow managed to hit that shutter button every day.

So over all I am very happy I’ve done the project but it’s no secret that I’ve got pretty sick of it. I have learnt a huge amount over the year, I think you can see that if you look over photos as a whole. The question is where do I go from here? What frequency will I be producing photos now that I’m not forced/required/committed to doing one daily? Honestly – I have no idea, all I can tell you is that I am in love with photography & I have more projects planned for myself. But from now I will be taking on non-time-based photography projects for example – I will be carrying on my Quotos & I also plan to start a project called 50 Strangers. So I might have a break for a little while, but keep your eyes on my flickr because it doesn’t end here.

This is also my first post as part of Project52, so I will be trying to do 1 blog post a week for the whole of 2010… yes I know I’m a sucka!

If you want to keep up with my photos & my bloggings I’d thoroughly suggest following me on twitter.

But wait! There’s more! If you pick something I use I’ll send you a print of a photo of your choice, so get involved!

If you haven’t seen any of my Quotos yet here are the ones I have done so far:

So what are you waiting for! HELP ME OUT!

Update 31^st December – So I didn’t end up finishing my 365 on a Quoto, it just didn’t feel right & I wasn’t going to sacrifice the quality of my Quoto set just to get something out the door.

P.S. I was going to use Phil’s Usual Suspect quote, but now I’m not & he doesn’t get a print, so instead I’m gunna give him a massive snog!

Anyway, enough of that, it’s been a really nice project to work on, James & I both had some really strong ideas. Three words came up over and over – Simple, Strong, Clean and I think this has translated nicely into the final product.

The Brand

First thing I thought about was the logo, I got some ideas down on paper and then translated them to screen. I actually ended up sending a whole bunch over to James, loads more than I would normally send.

In the end we settled on one of the simplest concepts, you might groan – Oh it’s Helvetica… but I don’t care, it works and it looks good.

The Site

I actually came up with quite a lot of the idea for the site while sitting next to Ashley at the FOWD Tour Glasgow, in the form of random sketches in the back of my Moleskine. Then they went into my layout pad at home, and I showed them to James, he got really excited about the concepts and could see exactly where I was going which was great.

After the sketches I did a proof of concept or two and once I was happy with how it was working I started translating that to WordPress. Man I love me some WordPress!

The Home Page

Roll on a few months and the build is complete, the home page features a giant background image for some wow factor (always guaranteed with a James Arnold photo).

The About & Contact Page

The about and contact page carry on the full size image, with a nice layer of content over the top.

The Galleries

The galleries are defiantly my favourite part of the site, so simple, it’s just throwing the images right up in your face. The images automatically scale to the height of your browser window, when you are on a gallery you can use your arrow keys on the keyboard to easily flick between photos, nice. I’ve done something pretty hot with the menu too, (thanks to Jamie for help with the JavaScript here).

The Blog

The blog is a bit of a contrast to the other parts of the site, more structure, more white space. Hopefully James will keep this updated, I’m hoping for some behind the scenes stuff!

Anyway, check it out – James-Arnold.co.uk – and let me know what you think!

What is left in 2009 for me?

• A LOT of work!
• Finish my 365
• Come up with a killer last shot for my 365
• Buy my 3rd iPhone (Tomorrow)
• Spend as much time with Kym as I can
• Survive Christmas!

I am sure I have missed out loads, wow the year has gone quick! I totally can’t keep up with it and I have a terrible memory! Maybe I’ll add some more stuff to the list as I remember but this will do for now.

What have you done this year?

Ashley did a post yesterday that I enjoyed so I thought I’d do one myself.