This theme was way out of my comfort zone. I wanted to do something about summer, especially since I was going into a week with a few days off from work for a staycation, and would be doing a lot of very summer-specific activities. I didn't think just taking photos of summer events would be visually consistent, so I decided on still lifes. A lot of Instagram posts are the very popular shot-from-above photo of food or flowers, so I thought it would be a good aesthetic to try out. There's even a popular hashtag for it, #stillography.

But still lifes are not really my thing. All of my schooling in photojournalism was about not setting up the shot and trying instead to capture the moment as it happened. Creating the images really relied more on my limited background in graphic design than photography. I also found things looked a lot better in my head! A few times, I had a great idea in mind, but when I set it up and shot it, it didn't look as good as I expected. That's totally different from my regular process, where I stop to photograph something because I see it in front of me and it looks interesting and worth documenting.

Still, it was fun to put some of these shots together, and there were more variables under my control. The whole set would have looked better if they were all true still lifes of stationary objects, but the exceptions (the ice cream cone and string of lights) were too summery to pass up.