How long should a project take?

Intro

Welcome to episode 604 of the Perceptive Photographer podcast. Before we jump into today’s topic, how long should your project take to finish? Just a couple of quick reminders. First, if you are in the Seattle area on November 5, make sure you save that date to come down and check out my lecture on landscape, meaning and identity at the Photographic Center Northwest. Also, if you are in the central Oregon area on October 17, I’ll be doing a one-day workshop with the Cascade Camera Club on workflow and editing in Lightroom. In the afternoon, I’ll help with image triage on the photos you bring in, focusing on editing and processing. Should be a lot of fun.

Today we’re talking about how long it should take to complete a project, which is a really interesting question. The short answer is it takes as long as it takes; however, a few things can impact our thoughts and approaches to working with projects.

Single Image or Projects

I think one of the first things that’s important is for you to decide if you’re working on single images or you’re actually working on a project. I think when we do single image photography, it’s fun. We enjoy it. It’s super interesting. But at some point, we realize we have a lot of the same sort of thing happening over and over again, and we think about how those images might relate. Thus, we start a project; even if we aren’t doing a project, we start one.

Clarity of Purpose

And I think as we start those projects, it’s important for us to consider the clarity of purpose around that project. Are we doing this for technical, artistic, narrative purposes? What do we need to do when the project’s done? What does it mean when we have work that we return to over and over again? Because the essence of a project is determined not by how much time it takes, but whether or not the project communicates what we want.

And as I mentioned in the podcast, sometimes what we end up with is a series of small projects that roll up into a larger project a project that might take a very short amount of time or a project that might take our entire life. There is no right length of time for a project. What there is is the right amount of time for us to get what we need out of a project. That might be something as simple as how the camera works or as complex as our identity as it evolves.

Conclusion

As I mentioned, in the beginning, it takes as long as it takes, but what matters is recognizing when a project is actually done, versus when we’re walking away because it’s hard, or that it probably never should’ve been a project at all.

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