52 Week Project - Week 3

Blaketown Sunset - "Red". Samsung S3

Week three of the 52 Week Project and the subject is 'Red'.

The more perceptive of you will realise that I'm a little (lot) late with the third installment - it's actually more like week 6!

No excuses - but I'm also not going to beat myself up about it either. I have had a few people join me on this project (thanks Bryn and Grace) a little late, so I've stopped to let them play 'catch-up'. We are probably back on track now - and anyway, who said that the 52 weeks of the Project had to be consecutive?! :-)

Is my contribution this week really red? Or is it more orange? Or maybe Orangey-Red? There's definitely a big spike in the red channel of the histogram (if that's anything to go by) - and that's good enough for me.

This is actually another phone shot, taken a few evenings ago when I just happened to be out to witness another glorious West Coast sunset (more on that next post). If not for this chance encounter with a beautiful sunset, I probably still wouldn't have a 'Red' image?

I can tell already that the 'creative' component of theses projects is going to represent the biggest challenge to me. Why is that? Am I not a very creative person? Do I not think very creatively when it comes to photography? Or have I got into a rut from 25 years of shooting? I guess projects like this are designed to get you thinking more creatively than you otherwise would have to if you concentrated solely on landscapes or portraits (not to say that you can't or shouldn't be creative with either of those subjects).

Have I been 'creative' in my interpretation of 'Red' as a subject? If I'm honest with myself, then 'no', I haven't been. I've just taken a shot of a beautiful sunset that just happens to have red tones in it (lucky for me). That's not to say that I wasn't thinking about other ways I could interpret the colour red - because I have been, a lot. In the end though, nothing really sparked my interest, and the above shot was taken and posted almost out of sheer desperation.

And maybe that's also what these projects/challenges are good for. Exposing weaknesses. Shaking us out of habits and ruts. Blowing the cobwebs, slowly but surely, out of the creative corners of the brain. If I can achieve that this year, then the challenge will have been worth it.