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!

From the start I knew I wanted something very simple to allow the focus to be on the photos. I jumped into my sketchbook & after about 20-30 minutes I knew the direction I wanted to go in.

Fireworks was my next port of call, I laid out a twelve column grid & brought my sketchbook concepts to the screen. As I went I leaked a few previews to my Dribbble account, which was awesome getting constructive feedback.

Building the site was the easy part, I’ve used HTML5 & some trick CSS3 bits, like box-shadow, opacity, transition & nth-child, this made for some pretty rapid development as well as some beautifully light & semantic markup.

For the image slider on the gallery pages I used the jQuery powered the Nivo Slider which I fell in love with a few months ago & have been dying for a reason to use. With the help of Jamie Thompson, & his ninja JavaScript skills, I customised the slider a little bit to automatically attach the thumbnails for each image to the page, oh I did some ninja CSS to give the images a bit of pre loading before they start running on the slider too, it makes the view experience so much better.

If you’ve got this far through this blog post you are probably expecting a link to the site right now… well I don’t like to disappoint so here – Go & check out my new photo site!

As always I would love some feed back on the site, good bad, black, white, anything goes.

If you are a web geek you might want to have a look at my style sheet, it’s OCD gone mad…

“Sometimes I stay up so late that I have my morning coffee before I go to bed.”

"If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light."

“No matter how far you have gone on the wrong road, turn back”

“A human being is only breath and shadow.”

"Shoot the kids and drown the neighbours! We’ve got a winner!"

"Tempers are wearing thin. Let’s hope some robot doesn’t kill everybody."

P.S. I know I haven’t been blogging as much as I should have been but I am back on it now! Promise!

The nicest thing about doing this has been doing it with friends, some of them dropped out, some of them have had a little break, one of them even completed it with me. It’s been a good project & really given me a chance to put that nifty fifty lens though it’s paces.

When I realised that I would be staying with Ashley for the final day of the project I thought it could be kinda cool to do some sort of joint photo, so I came up with a of a concept & talked her through it, she loved the idea. I’ve put together a mini site – fiftyoffifty.co.uk – which shows of this final image as well as rounding up the rest of the project all on one page. Check it out!