PAW 2011

The “Picture a Week” (PAW) project began as a challenge to myself to get at least one picture every week that was worthy of publication in my LightDescription blog. My original intention was to minimize family photos; however, my granddaughter is so photogenic, so active and, well, so cute that she was still my main subject. In addition to this blog, my PAW photos are “published” in a SmugMug gallery.  This picture, PAW 6, was the most popular picture – by far -- in that gallery.

Of course, producing a picture a week would be much more difficult if film were used. With film, to keep on schedule, the photo would have to be taken early enough in the week so that it could be chemically processed, scanned and post processed for publication in the blog. Instead, all of my PAW were digital and post processed in Photoshop.

To determine popularity, I relied on SmugMug statistics. That is, the assumption was made that anyone sufficiently interested in my PAW would click through the current PAW to the SmugMug PAW gallery, see the thumbnails and look at an enlarged version of the picture. There is a major problem with this method for my PAW project because, naturally, the first images in the SmugMug portfolio tend to have more views than the images that were added later in the year.

The High Dynamic Range (HDR) PAW were always popular and PAW 25 was the most popular of the HDR images.

This “fog” picture – almost an afterthought—was popular, PAW 30.

I really liked this picture of kids playing in the fountains, PAW 15, and thought it to be one of my better efforts for the year.

Not as popular as I thought it would be, this Swiss Army Knife adventure, PAW 28, was a good one to add to my Swiss Army Knife collection of photos.

The third most popular picture was the first one posted, my granddaughter about this time last year, PAW 1a.

The second most popular picture was PAW 3.

 

Did any of the PAW replace one of my previous “Top Ten”? No and this was sort of frustrating as I really hoped that the PAW project would generate a Top Ten Photo.

The PAW project will end with PAW 52. Instead of PAW, in 2012 LightDescription will regularly feature a photo – could be recent or from the past – along with the processes and thoughts that went into it.

Have a Happy New Year with much good photography!