The summer can seem a long time whether there’s a heatwave, you’ve got kids off school or your normal routine has been paused for the summer months.
The following ideas are all little projects you can do to keep some creativity flowing at home or during a holiday and they can be great for entertaining kids. You can easily do all of these using a smartphone camera.
1. Cyanotypes:
Last month I talked about my summer project on cyanotypes – really fun to do with kids and easy if you buy pretreated paper. If you didn’t see it read it here
2. Do a Photo Challenge:
Find a photo challenge to keep you going. Look on Pinterest where you’ll find lots of ideas, find them on Instagram – I’m enjoying following one from @photographylearningwithmona It doesn’t matter if you don’t get to do one every day or if you miss one – you can treat it more like a scavenger hunt.
It’s how the My Month of Noticing group started – you can find us on Facebook or ask to be added to the MMN mailing list to get weekly prompts.
3. Daily project:
Shoot the same thing every day for a week or longer – you could do it at the same time (as my rooftop sequence) or at different times. Make sure it’s somewhere you can do easily on a daily basis
4. Create a collection:
Photo collections: Shoot multiple photos of the same type of thing and create a collection. Doors, windows, cats, clouds( this might be a bit tricky to do right now), trees, street scenes, sunsets, patterns,etc etc. You could also pick a single colour to shoot.
5. Make some ‘art’:
Create collage art from your photos – print them on plain paper and cut and tear and stick them together to create something new and unique. This is a good project to do in a heatwave or whenever we might get some rain!
All of these should be fun – August always feels like the month for experimenting and playing to me. I hope you find something here to play with too.