If you are an active photographer and have access to a web site where
you can post your images, you may want to consider taking a stab at
the PAW (Picture a Week) Project. The "rules" are simple and quite
unofficial (as this is a voluntary effort on everyone's part). Make
sure that you get out at least once a week and take some photos (film
or digital). Then post the ONE image that you think is the best. It
may not be a good image, but post it anyway. I found that even some
shots that I thought were good were really pretty bad after hearing
some of the comments. The raisons d'être for the project is to get
everyone shooting more often and improving everyone's photography as
a result the feedback gotten. I'm still not that good, but am much
better than I was 6 years ago.
Wondering how PAW started? ...
Around the turn of the century, Kyle Cassidy of Philadelphia got
tired of hearing Leica owners on Leica Users Group forum talk about
their nice cameras when it would have been more productive to use
them. With tongue firmly planted in cheek, he challenged those camera
fondlers to take one decent picture a week and post it. Well, some
folks rolled their eyes back, some went on talking about their
cameras, but a handful took the challenge seriously (sort of) and
started posting a picture a week. The idea was conceived in 2000, so
we are entering our seventh year of PAW with 2007.
If you need a place to post your photos ...
The PAW mailing list is independent of any photo hosting site or web
server, but one of the folks pursuing the PAW project, Sagar Joshi,
for the purpose of giving photographers a place to post photos and
get comments and feedback. It presents a useful place to host photos
and has web-based forums for discussion and critique as well. It's
worth checking out ... see the link above for more information ...
but remember that the PAW Project has no central authority or
dedicated affiliation. Like the Internet, the PAW project and mailing
list is worldwide, free, and ungoverned for the most part.
