Cleveland Commercial Photographer, Don Bensman Photography

Cleveland commercial photographer captures rubber duck for personal growth…

I’ve always been enthusiastic when it comes to photographing personal projects. As a full-time professional photographer, I tend to get wrapped up in client projects and everything becomes about the work. There’s nothing wrong with diving hard into client projects. I love the collaborations, getting to work with different people and creating images to attract their target audiences… but I always work out some time to do my own projects. My personal work over the years has been a great way to update certain aspects of my portfolio, express my visualizations, and to create stories that I might have interest in… and to have a little fun!

Unfortunately for me, it’s been quite a few months since I did any kind of personal work. Last year was extremely busy and left little time (definitely not complaining) and when I did find time, I found myself filling it with other things. I had several possible ideas for my own projects, but for some reason I was avoiding them. Truth be told, I was just having difficulty motivating myself to get started. The second a client would call, I was “Johnny On The Spot”, but for my own work, it was a struggle. The longer it went on, the more pressure I put on myself, which definitely made things worse… and I needed a way out.

A few weeks ago, I made a quick blog post about the rubber duck that’s here at the studio (you can check it out here). When I started writing up that little post, something just clicked and the proverbial lightbulb came on. I decided to take a bit of a leap and do a series of images of the rubber duck. It was a crazy idea for me to do a project with something I wouldn’t normally photograph (toys), but I figured it might just be the thing I needed… and I needed to shake things up!

The original plan was to come up with an extensive shot list (around 30 images) that I would capture over 30 days, but I quickly realized that was a huge mistake. Straight away, I was right back to putting unnecessary pressure on myself (which could have been difficult with Client schedules), and this was supposed to be fun. I immediately shifted to plan B, which meant coming up with 4 or 5 image ideas to start and leaving off the hard deadline. This would allow me the opportunity to develop new ideas as I went along and I could possibly make it a long term project that could easily be started and stopped if I chose to. The only real parameters I put on the project were that some of the images had to maintain a commercial feel and the rest could be some fun experimentation.

So far, the project has been a pleasant success. It turns out the the rubber duck really helps to keep things lighthearted… even though it can be surprisingly tricky to photograph in certain situations. It’s also giving me some additional quality time behind a new camera that I wasn’t initially thrilled about shooting. However, the best part of the project, is that it’s already getting me excited about revisiting some of the personal work I’ve been putting off. So it’s been a win, win situation.

The images featured here are a handful of what I’ve captured so far… please stay tuned for more to come!

The image (above) for which the rubber duck was initially acquired.

Personal Project: Rubber Duck

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