To be honest, I thought I would not write a post this month and instead do one for both February and March next month. The reason was that I felt I didn’t do much (photographically) to have something to write about. Yet I changed my mind.
SiP winter workshop
The month started with our first virtual workshop/meetup of the year at Stuck in Plastic. It was once again a lot of fun and we wrote a blog post celebrating the 10 years of Ninjago. This time, I was lucky to have good weather and could take photos outside.
Seasons
Following the winter workshop, we started planning the next one for spring. We also revealed that this year, we will work around the theme of seasons. In addition to those seasonal workshops, we aim at having an exhibition by the end of the year, with the four seasons as a red thread.
To be honest, when we picked this theme, it felt a bit too easy. It kind of feels like I’ve been working on this project for already four years and I’m sitting on a pile of images that I could simply reuse for this project.
That said, I have a couple of ideas I worked on during 2021 that could actually be used specifically for this. I still miss one or two images for each idea, and I’m looking forward to being able to take them. Initially, I planned on taking the first missing photo towards the end of March or the beginning of April. I hope that work (or COVID-19) won’t prevent me from taking it though… Otherwise, I’ll probably have to rethink my whole project idea.
Using toy photography for work
For a long time, I’ve wanted to use toy photography for work purposes, as part of PowerPoint presentations. However, it always seemed quite a difficult task. Not only many technical concepts I need to explain can be quite difficult to turn into photo ideas, but creating photos for presentation is also quite time-consuming.
Last year, for a (virtual) conference, I took two photos that I used for my opening and concluding slides for a 5-minute presentation, which was recorded on top of a hill near Varangerbotn during my midsummer road trip.
Since September, because my work has included more teaching recently, I’ve been participating in the university pedagogy training for the teaching staff of the University of Oulu. Last week, for one of the pedagogy seminars, I had to give a “micro-teaching” session. Thanks to a topic not so technical and a short presentation, I was able to include plenty of existing photos in my slides.
Projects on hold
As I said, I had the feeling I hadn’t done much more photographically this month. There hasn’t been any progress on any of the projects I wanted to finish. At the beginning of the month, I even decided to start a new one… But as I’m writing this it’s been over two weeks that I haven’t touched my camera.
I’m slowly feeling like coming out of the rut and feel the need to take photos. But at the same time, next month won’t be easy work-wise. I was already feeling mentally exhausted last week and I have no idea how my creative rut will react if it gets worse.
I decided to list here the list of projects I have on hold, hoping it will lead me to be able to check one as done in the next blog post:
- Jurassic World 2020 LEGO dinosaurs photos and review blog post
- One more image to take for SiPgoesTT
- Concluding blog post for SiPgoesTT
- Write about my biggest achievement of 2020
- Write about my season project ideas for 2021
- One image to remake for SiPgoes53 (and write about it?)
- Write a blog post about my final image selection of SiPgoes52
- Either finish my Diagon Alley photo project or give it up and publish the photo I took in December
- Photograph the Ninjago dragon I built in February
- Photograph the Chinese New Year set I built in February
- Build (and photograph?) the LEGO Sesame Street set I got in December
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