the one new year’s resolution i’m determined to keep

Years ago now, four of them, maybe (four years? really?), I got an email from a guy I’ll call Greg, because that is his name. He asked me to join the staff of the website Utata, which is the public presence of an active Flickr group. The reason I joined the staff was to write a Front Page once a week. See, on Utata, every weekday (or nearly every weekday), a member of the staff chooses a photograph from the group pool of photos and writes something to go with it and publishes it to the site. It’s a cool thing to do, and actually, there’s a published book of a few years’ worth of these Front Pages — which is a beautiful collection, by the way.

Anyway, as time wore on, Greg and I would chat about other Utata-related stuff, and somehow I wound up helping him come up with the elements for an ongoing project called Iron Photographer. I’m fairly certain I’ve written about IP before, but I’m too lazy to dig through my archives, so here’s a short synopsis: you know the show Iron Chef where chefs make a meal based around a mystery ingredient? We sort of do the same thing, except without The Chairman, Alton Brown, or the goal of making several plates of food. What we do is come up with three elements: two compositional, one artistic, and present those elements to the group, and members are free to create up to six photographs for the project containing those elements (of course, they could make hundreds if they wanted, but are only able to contribute a maximum of six). Then two weeks later, we do it again. I’m not really sure how I wound up helping with this, but it’s one of my favorite things that I do for Utata. I no longer contribute to the Front Page, but man, I like having random conversations with Greg that culminate in getting other people to make creative stuff. It’s a cool gig. If you’re interested, Greg wrote more about this on his blog.

Last year, I kind of wound up taking a break from photography, but I decided that I missed it and wanted to get back into doing it. And here’s the thing about Iron Photographer: it’s a project that existed long before I contributed anything to it other than photos, and the fun that surrounds it got me to try all kinds of stuff that I wouldn’t have ordinarily even considered. I’m no photographic genius or anything, but I do okay — I can visualize an image in my head and then make it into a photograph — and everything I learned, I learned from Iron Photographer. I learned things about composition, lighting, staging a photo, different crops, different editing styles, all by experimenting with IP. It’s a fun project and because of that, I felt comfortable playing around. In all that play, I figured some stuff out. Good deal, that.

I think also I developed something akin to a style. The thing about photographers I admire is that I can see their work, even the tiniest sliver or thumbnail of a photo, and I immediately know it’s theirs. I don’t know if that’s the case with me or not (though I’ve done enough self-portraiture that my photos are at least recognizable when I’m in them), but I like things that are beautiful combined with the odd, I like sex appeal juxtaposed with discomfort, and I like things that are just a bit off-kilter. Dark, funny and weird. That’s me, really. Not all the photos I’ve taken would fit into anything resembling those categories, because sometimes I’m just plain goofy.

The point is, this year, I decided I would contribute at least one photograph to each Iron Photographer challenge. So, at least every two weeks, I’ll take a photo of whatever elements Greg and I cook up in those astoundingly weird yet entertaining conversations we have, and maybe in the process, I’ll remember what it is I love about making photos in the first place. Or at the very least, I’ll have more excuses to play with knives and fire.

I like playing with knives.

And fire.