Matt’s Bike

Before I returned Matt’s bike, I took this last shot.

In one post I mentioned that my brother died from cancer in 2016. At the time of his diagnosis he was positive that he would not only beat the disease, but that a year later we would be riding the Huntsman 140 and Lotoja together. That didn’t quite work out the way we had planned.

He was my favorite biking partner, so I feel like the pictures of the bike are kind of appropriate for the beginning of this project.

 

What in the world am I trying to accomplish here?

For those who want a more detailed explanation about this project, this is it. For a long time I have had a few projects rattling around in my head, but I haven’t felt like I had the skill to pull some of them off. A couple of months ago I decided I needed a new project whether I was ready for it or not. As I was digging around in some stuff, desperately hoping for some inspiration, I found a glass that I had filled with spare change. And, that seemed to be the answer I was looking for. Instead of planning a big project that would require skills that I feel like I don’t have yet, endlessly thinking about how much work or practice would be necessary to pull it off, this idea started with a quarter.

What could be done with one quarter? I wondered if I could turn one single quarter into $1000 for cancer research.

So, after some thought I came up with some guidelines for the project. Foremost, is NO FACEBOOK. I know that everyone posts everything on Facebook these days, but I’m hoping (and probably in vain) that people won’t post about this project. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the top two are that I don’t just want this to be noise on the Internet, and I don’t want it to look like some gimmick.

In March 2016, my older brother died from cancer. That’s the short story behind why I’m doing this, it’s not to try to get a bunch of likes or to go viral.

The rest of the guidelines are actually within my control. The project has to be funded with a single quarter. Now, a quarter can’t really buy much these days. In fact, it can buy 1 4×6 print. So once I print the first photograph, the whole project may just come to a screeching halt if no one thinks it’s worth buying. I guess those are the risks, I might lose my quarter.

To fund a project with a quarter I had to decide what was allowed and what wasn’t. Now, the camera was kind of a given. But, where do you draw the line? I decided that it’s ok to use the camera I have and lights, but that’s it. Which kind of causes a problem to begin with. Since I have disallowed everything else that I own at the beginning of the project I can’t just go grab a piece of paper out of the printer or a sheet of foam core. Basically, I have to use stuff I find or borrow or go somewhere that looks nice, until I can buy a prop or whatever item I want to photograph.

Now, how do I do that? Well, For every picture I sell I will put 25% of the sale price aside and at the end of the year I will donate it to HCI. The end of the year would be Sept 27, 2019 not this December. The other 75% will be used to fund the project and pay taxes and that sort of stuff.

Just how many pictures I should put in this series was something I debated for a while. I finally resolved to take 300 pictures over the course of the year. Taking a few pictures on one day is ok but I will only ever add 1 to the project on a given day. That will help me to be consistent and not get way behind and scramble to catch up.

When a picture sells I will sign it and write the running amount raised on the picture. Hopefully, by the end of the year it will exceed the $1000 mark.

Hopefully, I have covered the what I’m doing thing (if not I will just have to come back and edit it later).

And with that, I will give you my first picture of the set.

This is the picture to kick off the project. Stay tuned to see if it takes off or dies on the vine.