BLOG 7 JUN 2020: The A-Z of photography?

ABC sweets photographed on a lightbox

I was planning a series of blog posts called “The A-Z of Photography”.  26 posts one for each letter of the alphabet.  Should be easy, right?  I started a list and had a few ideas but was missing a couple of letters.  So I asked online for suggestions trying to filling the blanks.  I then did a little bit of googling to find ideas and a lot of brainstorming.

Now I have a different problem.  Those 26 ideas have grown to 201 different ideas for posts (or thereabout – there might be a little bit of duplication).  So how on earth do I narrow that down to just 26?

My first thought was to do two series and go through the alphabet twice, once for beginners and once for intermediate. But that’s only 52, that leaves 149 topics left over.  Ok, so beginner, intermediate and studio?   No, no that won’t work – I’ve only got one topic for Y and 23 great ideas for S.

I started looking through the list looking for inspiration.  Then I had a brainwave – what if I replace “<letter> is for…” with “What is/are…”  that gives me 201 titles for blog posts.  Ok, I might need to tweak one or two titles “What are models?” is probably not the best title for a blog post.  “How do I get started in photographing models?” might work a bit better.

Now, I have something that might enable me to use all of my ideas.  But where do I start?  Well, I’m not sure:

• I could start at the beginning and just work my way down the list. But that means it could be a long time before I get to talk about zoom creep, for example.
• I could just number each topic and use a random number generator. That kind of appeals to me, but it is hardly a structured approach.
• I could just look down the list each week and choose something that takes my fancy. This is not a bad idea, but it will, of course, mean the difficult and less interesting topics will always get ignored.  Not only that, but that is making the blog about me and what I want. As a content creator, one lesson I’m learning is that I should not write about what I want to write – it should be about what my audience wants.
• I could ask you, my readers, to pick the topics you want to hear about. You could even suggest some titles that I’ve missed.  The danger here is that I get to hear a lot of crickets!  And that will be just so disheartening.

Ok, so here’s the plan – I have been through the “? is for…” list and converted it into a list of 200 (at the time of writing) different titles for blog posts.  I’ve posted the document in my Facebook group – you will need to be a member of the group if you want to read it.  (See what I’m doing there? I’m using it as a hook to get you to join the group!)

If members of my Facebook group wish to suggest titles from the list – those will be the topics I will give priority to.  Any new ideas will be added to the list.  If no one suggests anything I’ll pick something that either takes my fancy or I’ll use my trusty random number generator.

So to summarise:

• Join the Facebook group (If you aren’t already a member)
• Read the list of titles
• Let me know which titles you would like me to tackle first

See you over on the Facebook group

Until next time, keep MAKING great images,

Ian.