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I have shot many day in the life of Chloe in the last year. It is one of my favorite shooting exercises, but that is not why I included it as a bonus assignment in the first run of my workshop Telling Stories with Lifestyle Photography. As an exercise in storytelling, it is one of the best.
In the course of one day you take a variety of lifestyle & documentary images in multiple rooms, under different lighting conditions, and from many different perspectives and orientations. At the end of the day you cull and edit those images to tell a story. Your creativity begins while shooting and carries through to the end when you finalize the story. You cannot blog every single image you take so you must be very selective in which images make the cut. This is why it is a great lesson in storytelling. With each new DITL you improve your shooting/editing skills and when the days start to run together you look for new inspiration to make the day interesting, particularly if the day is the average day where nothing new happened. Maybe you identify a particular segment of the day or story you want to pursue on a different day and you make a note of this.
Several participants in the first run said I made it look so easy. Let’s have a moment of reality. I do not finish every day I start. I do not take an entire card of amazing images in each day. I do not nail every spontaneous moment that happens. The last few days in the life of Chloe I have photographed instead of blogging them as an entire day I used individual stories from that day for different purposes. If you follow any of my collaborative photography projects or my Facebook page you have likely seen bits and pieces of them. What I do believe is if you shoot daily, study your work to consider ways of improving them, and are more prepared the next time an opportunity comes; you will become a better photographer and storyteller. Improving your craft is a never-ending journey and daily shooting is just one way I work on mine.
Interested in taking the workshop? Stay tuned!
Just a few of my daily favorites from this week because every blog post needs pictures 😉
denver, dallas
& worldwide