Personal Projects and Why You Need (at least) One

Endangered since the 1970s, it was easy to choose the red-cockaded woodpecker as my subject of a personal project. Not only did I have a strong affinity for birds, but the specific species connected me to my childhood, as well. Photo and story by: Annalise Kaylor

Sit around a glowing campfire or pull up a stool to a working-photographer-laden happy hour and it won’t be long before you start hearing about the catch-22s that exist on the business side of being a photographer.  For example, you need the gear to get the kind of photos that sell, but in order to afford the gear, you need to sell more photos.

The same goes for assignment work.  You need to demonstrate you’re capable of completing the assignment to get more work but need the work to first show you’re capable of completing the assignment.

Enter the personal project.

Personal projects are one of the best ways to demonstrate your technical skills as a photographer, but also a way to show editors and buyers “how” you see a complete and total project.  They communicate who you are as a photographer, but on your own terms. With a personal project, you’re essentially giving yourself an assignment that demonstrates who you are, what you see, how you see it, and how you pull that together into a cohesive package.

If you’re pursuing fine art or gallery sales, then personal projects are where you can really push the envelope and show people, not just tell people, who you are as an artist and what your work is all about. If you shoot a lot of stock photography, it’s a way to get outside of your routine and do something a bit more personal to you without worrying about saleability. If you’re trying to pursue more direct-to-client work or magazine assignments, you come away with a project to pitch. And, they provide plenty of ancillary pieces of content that can be used on your social media channels to promote your work or get people talking about what you’re doing.

Not just for beginners, personal projects are also perfect for anyone looking to make their way into a new genre, too. For example, as a photojournalist, my portfolio and archive of work are hundreds of thousands of images deep and quite robust - but very little of it was dedicated to conservation photojournalism and wildlife photography, the areas in which I wanted to specialize. So, I started creating assignments for myself to beef up my conservation and wildlife portfolio and start pitching editors.

Self-assigned work does more than just benefit the obvious, public-facing parts of your business, too. Personal projects keep your work fresh and keep your creativity flowing.  They provide the ultimate in freedom - freedom to fail, freedom to explore new techniques, freedom to choose your subject, and decide the overall vision for a project. They allow you to set aside all of the “what ifs” that come with second-guessing our work (as is natural) and just PLAY.  You’re not bound or committed to sharing your work with anyone, and you can tweak and refine what you’re doing as you go. The rules are all yours.

There is no way to define what does and does not make a good personal project. In my experience, the ones that are the best for you are the ones about which you are most passionate. Passion is a hearty fuel for the days you need an extra push to keep going.

A passionate birder (and Audubon Master Birder), one of my favorite personal projects was following a colony of red-cockaded woodpeckers for a whole season. Endangered since the 1970s, these woodpeckers are specialists in every way. They practice cooperative breeding in a way that’s unique in the bird world, they live exclusively in longleaf pine forests, and, unlike other birds, they make their cavity nests in living trees. There is so much more to these incredible birds, but I really wanted to focus on the demands of their daily lives and how they were, against all odds, slowly inching their way off the endangered species list. I wanted to create a project that showed off just how remarkable and special these birds are, while also highlighting their slow-and-steady-wins-the-race success.

I spent weeks scouting for and locating the kind of woodpecker colony I was looking for, and countless hours sitting in a homemade blind on the tick-riddled pine forest floor photographing and making videos of these birds. I reached out to the PR department for the wildlife refuge area I was in and arranged to interview a few of the rangers who had been working with the various red-cockaded colonies over the years. I pursued this project with all I had.

At the time of this project, my staff photography job also had me on the road for 150 or so days per year. Yet every time I was home, I spent at least one or two days a week with the woodpecker colony. I witnessed everything from courtship, the loss of a hatchling, the cooperative breeding with last year’s young, and countless other moments as these birds worked the overstory the love so much as their home. I saw insects I’d never seen before in their bills and in the downtime in my blind, I started learning the names of butterflies I hadn’t yet mastered.  I plucked ticks off me by the dozens every outing (and ended up with Lyme disease to boot) and sweated off ten pounds in the sweltering Georgia summer heat.

Finally, near the end of the summer, all of my work finally paid off - my first view of a fledgling peeking out of the cavity. The tiny, endangered bird with his little red spot on his head, begging for food from his parents and siblings. The tears rolled down my cheeks and I made a quick social media video about that moment for my followers. It wasn’t just that I saw these birds or that I had spent an entire breeding season by their sides. It was that I had been waiting for more than 30 years to see this.

For me, this project wasn’t just about my love of birds. It was about where my love of birds came from - my grandmother Sylvia. Thumbing through her first edition Field Guide to the Birds by when I was about eight years old, I stumbled upon the listing for the red-cockaded woodpecker, a bird that only seemed to live in one small patch of trees in the southeastern United States. And I was enthralled by them, and I was worried that because they were so critically endangered at the time, I might never get to see them.

There was one woman I immediately thought of when I saw my first red-cockaded woodpecker: my grandmother Sylvia. My breath was held captive and my lips quivered, but my mind raced in conversation with her, “Oh G., look!,” I whispered out loud to the heavens, “I found them! I finally found them!”

I held my breath for what felt like five minutes more before I exhaled, tears of joy and fond memories merging with my southern summer sweat and cascading down my cheeks. It had taken me weeks, but I had finally found an active and thriving colony of red-cockaded woodpeckers, a species that has been on the official endangered list since the 1970s and on my “must find” bird list for nearly as long.

This is how I started my pitch letter to Audubon Magazine for a reported essay on these fascinating birds and their recovery over the last few decades. The editor at Audubon loved my pitch and my images, but they had just run an update on that species a few years ago and their publication aims to leave five years in between covering a species as a feature. They invited me to pitch it again when the time had passed and that in the meantime, I should keep sending in my story ideas.

Yet another personal project hit me when all of my assignment work ground to a halt at the start of the pandemic. Bored and itching with wanderlust, I grabbed some of my vintage Russian camera lenses and went out into my yard. A perfectly shaped dandelion had gone to seed, its puffy white dome still entirely intact. I attached my Helios 44 lens to my camera and laid down on the ground.

My Helios-44 is an entirely manual lens - manual focus and manual aperture. I love using it for video work, and I love the dreamy, creamy bokeh it creates when it’s opened wide to f/2. On my belly for nearly five hours, I shot frame after frame of this one dandelion as each seed slowly took to flight. And all the while, a singular green aphid stayed perfectly still on the stem.

When I finished editing the photos, I created a set of three limited editions from the whole work. I sold only ten of them, and as a set. I posted them on Instagram and sold them out in a matter of a couple of weeks.

The extra cash is always nice, but the true dividends came from what I learned during all of the hours I spent on the floor of the longleaf forest and on my belly in my own front yard.  I felt more creative and had some new perspectives. I tried some new techniques that worked well and got rid of many others that didn’t. I missed incredible moments and learned how to let those go and focus on what I did grab instead.

And in the end, I sold out a limited edition series I created on a whim and I now am on a mailing list with Audubon’s photo editor whenever she’s looking for images and stories.

If you’re not sure your work is good enough, you’re unsure where to start, or you need a way of getting outside of your head and back into your work, then a personal project will do just that.