Some of you are new and wonder what you should be doing? First you might read the overview in the "Portfolio Project" section of "Club Activities" section of the NVPS website: http://nvps.org/main/meetings/portfolio/2009_-_2010_portfolio_project/. Hopefully, this will give you a good overview of what to expect this program year. There are other pieces of advice from previous years in that section.
If you haven't already started, your first task is to think about what you want to do and why. We would suggest: It should be something of interest to you that you want to invest some photographic time to this year. It might be something that is educational to you and/or pushes you somewhere new. We recommend against just editing pictures you have already taken on a trip or something unless you an excellent reason for doing that; for example, because you want to publish a table book of your best selected pictures from that effort and feel you would learn a lot by spending time learning to judge and edit your pictures.
Once you have a general idea about what you want to do, prepare a draft Artist Statement. If you are undecided between a couple of projects, it is OK at this time to prepare Statements for and work on them simultaneously until you decide on one topic on which to focus. Your Artist Statement should tell what you want to do and why. If you Google Artist's Statements Photography, you will obtain a number of examples. For example:
http://www.siberart.com/teaching/oberlin/downloads/artists_statement.pdf
Once you have determined your topic you should start shooting and acquiring potential images for your portfolio. You may use images in your portfolio that you have previously taken that fit your theme. They, however, should be a small sub-set of your portfolio. After all, the purpose of the project is to get you out thoughtfully shooting and judging your own work. In previous years some portfolio project participants have shot four or five hundred images, or more in some cases, over the project before selecting their 15 or 20 best. Our experience has been once you start receiving feedback on your images you will want to do more shooting.
Once you have prepared and drafted your Artist Statement send it to Bill and Scott for feedback.
When you have enough images that you feel might be good examples of what you are striving for in your portfolio you may upload them on the NVPS website. (http://nvps.org/gallery/v/Portfolio+Project/2009_2010/). Instructions will be forthcoming on this.
Let us know if you have any questions.
In summary you should be preparing your Artist's Statement, shooting images, putting them up on the NVPS website, and receiving feedback.
We will have two in person critiques prior to completing your portfolio and we'll be providing additional guidance and inspiration via this email list over the next few months.
Bill Prosser prosserwm@nospam!#*&^#)type address - don't copy spam protection(*@.@nospamaol.com 703-821-2670
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