I knew that once summer wrapped up I would need another large project to keep me busy until the warmer weather returned, so I devised something that I’m currently calling the Ant Farm.

You can read all the details on this page, but the quick pitch is that 100 people will be depicted crawling all over a large structure. The structure is made of 100 boxes, some horizontal, some vertical, all arranged into a tight grid. As with previous multi-person projects, I’m mostly leaving it up to the individual models to decide how they want to pose. This just makes it all the more interesting.

The one thing I’m doing slightly different this time is my approach to finding models. In the past I’ve hit up my circle of friends repeatedly until enough people agreed to pose (if for no reason other than to just shut me up). This time, however, I’m finding that word-of-mouth is providing most all the advertising I need to keep a steady stream of people coming over. Most of the emails that I’m getting start off with saying something like “My friend just posed for your project and now I want to do it!”

In actually executing this project, I’m finding that my most valuable tool is not my camera or the set pieces I use, it’s the spreadsheet that keeps track of all the people I’ve shot, the ones who are booked, and everyone else who has expressed interest. If I lost this I’d be sunk.

I shot my first model for this project on October 16, and as of today (November 26) I’ve shot 38, I have 14 people scheduled over the next couple weeks, and another 22 who have expressed interest but have not yet scheduled. Altogether, this represents 74 people, though history tells me I shouldn’t really count anyone until I’ve actually taken their picture. Even people who are really eager to participate sometimes can’t work it into their calendar.