52 weeks of me (a little vain, oh well).

So it’s 2013.

Some people may attempt hiding under the covers for the complete duration – it ends on a 13, you know – while others are celebrating the prime-ness of it all.

Whether you have great new resolutions or recycling old ones, or perhaps steered clear of any formal resolutions at all, with a new year, inevitably, come new things.

And this is true for me too. By choice, I might add.

I have enjoyed taking photographs from my first little (toy) camera when I was barely a person, anxiously waiting to see if my coveted roll of 24 (couple of months of pocket money it was) yielded any successful results. As a teen I received a “proper” point and shoot from my youngest brother as a birthday gift, and as a student, my eldest brother allowed me to tediously pay off my first (his old) slr, when he upgraded.

Then the digital era arrived.

Back to point and shoot, then a bit more functions and eventually, I think it was 2006, my first digital slr. Gone was the worry about film prices, but it came with its own perils: the risk of being snap happy and end up with thousands of images that end up in a dusty dark corner of a crashed hard drive somewhere (talking from experience).

As a designer, I have been taking product photography for my clients from basically the beginning. Products sit still, they don’t have to smile, they don’t get bored while you move light or it around, and they do not mind being cleaned.

People (and specifically kids, coz I got it into my head that I like taking pics of them) on the other hand do not sit still (at least not long), they are expected to look happy (or at least amazing), they get bored and: you try to chase a snotty nosed toddler with a tissue in the one hand and a camera in the other. Luckily moms usually come prepared for this eventuality. (Trust me, family photographs with dirty kids are only cute for a moment, look at that photo in a year or week and you’ll wish you had a wet-wipe.)

But, back to the present.

My photography now includes more active subjects, and I enjoy it. The shoot, the editing of images and the warm feeling when I see I photo I took on the wall or even as a FaceBook profile pic.

Still, I want to be better.

And even though many nights are spent reading up on equipment and techniques, in the end I have to press the shutter.

From a list of ideas for 52 week projects, I decided to choose self portraits (I have very few photos of myself, no surprises there). So here we go. And to start, the obligatory, photo in the mirror ;)

Week 1 - Me in the mirror.