For my first photoshoot I decided just to go on a walk through a nearby valley and see what caught my eye and inspired me from my natural surroundings, collecting a large variation of images in whatever styles suits the particular subject best and then later on working out which to keep and use in my photobook. This resulted in several hundred images of different plants. trees, birds, flowers and general landscape scenes which I narrowed down in Adobe Lightroom.
Firstly, I went through with the colour labels and either chose red or yellow for whether I wanted to discard the image immediately or move on to the next selection process. This ended up with me having roughly 70 images to work with.
Then I went through and either flagged them as “keep” or “discard” depending on whether there were other similar images which worked better, or if they were duplicates form a slightly different angle, or if they just overall didn’t work as well with the other images as I had hoped. This left me with 37 images. I then edited the final group of images a little, just making any corrections to the exposure or when the colour balance was off slightly, before exporting them out of Lightroom.
Once they were in my files I was able to analyse them against each other, physically putting them next to other images and comparing them in a range of different combinations, before separating them into two folders: “yes” and “no”. I decided against deleting any of the images in the “no” folder, as I could change my mind or my vision of the project could change slightly and they would be necessary again. I was also aware of the fact that I could end up using even less of these images, depending on how the other photoshoots go, so this selection is in no way final, but with some I already have an idea of how to use them effectively in the book.
At the end of all this I ended up with 28 images that I chose to keep and move on with into the next stage of my photobook.
(POSSIBLE LAYOUT)
“winter” 
“spring” 
“summer”
For my future photoshoots I know I am going to focus more on landscapes and scenes rather than individual plants, flowers and trees, and I also am planning to produce a series of portraits to use alongside these other images, possibly posed in similar positions. For example, the images below almost look like two heads looking at each other and two people of different heights standing next to each other, so I am going to make images with a similar form using people to mirror them.
As I said before I know I’m not going to end up using all of these images, but I do quite like some of them and I’m trying to think of interesting ways I can incorporate them into my photobook to best represent my idea of spring as a period of transition.