What I learned from shooting for 28 Days straight (#febfotochallenge recap)
Me, balancing work and play
Late last year I started to look for ways to level up my photography skill set. Stuck at home with the pandemic still looming, I decided to join an online community of female surf photographers called The Clique.
That's right. Surf photographers.
As a rock climber and marathon runner, I have always loved sports photography, but it wasn't until I found surf photography that I found an aesthetic I wanted to emulate.
Surf photography manages to walk the line between powerful and graceful. It balances the grit of sport without disavowing femininity. It is the kind of aesthetic that I wanted to bring into my own city-dwelling studio-shooting work.
When the group launched a 28-day challenge for February, I decided it was the perfect time to try my hand at this new aesthetic, all while shooting a ton.
Here is what I learned from shooting 28 days straight:
Sketch it Out. At work, I'd never walk onto a set without a sketch or full pre-pro, but my personal work is much more flexible. That being said, the days where I took time to find inspiration and plan out my shot went a lot smoother than those where I made it up as I went.
Streamline Your Editing. Making your own presets in Lightroom, or even finding your favorite edits to existing ones, is key to shooting and posting in a small window each day.
Invest in Do-It-All Gear (whatever that means to you). Shooting for 28 days straight highlighted what pieces of gear I could trust, and which ones I could skip. On average, I had about 30min to do each shot, so I needed gear that I could grab and go without much fuss. For me, that meant finding my perfect lens- and sometimes- my iPhone.
Community is King. My main takeaway comes from the community itself: learning together is way more fun than growing alone. Getting to see all the work rolling in each day was inspiring, and being a part of such a unique community allows me to learn from my peers across the globe. No matter how I felt about my own shots, I always received encouragement that kept me going.
Here are a few of my favorite images from this project:
