I’ve always been intrigued by collaborative photography projects: pairings of photos shot by two different photographers, a series of shots taken at the same time of day by a number of people, photographers swapping photos for others to edit. It’s interesting to see how each person interprets the challenge and the images that result.

This year I was lucky enough to embark on a 52-week project with my friend, Grant Brady. We met through IGKansascity–an account on Instagram for which we are moderators–and at the end of 2016 decided to launch a collaborative project involving Pantone colors.

The premise is simple. We each purchased a set of Pantone postcards, and we take turns every week choosing the color for the following week’s challenge. Shooting only with our iPhones, we have a week or less to find our match for the chosen color.

We didn’t set out with any hard and fast rules about what or how to photograph our finds. After including our hands in the first couple of diptychs, we’ve continued to use that element in our shots. We use a simple app to combine our shots each week, with his always on the right and mine on the left.

There have been weeks that were more challenging and some shots we don’t favor as much as others. For me, that’s part of the process. The diptych above was not our favorite but it remains part of the project and is duly documented.

As you can see, we’ve been playing with backgrounds, lighting and settings for our shots. Sometimes the items we shoot seem to have a common theme, even though we generally don’t share our plans prior to shooting.

If you want to follow along, our hashtag for the project is #ISpyPantone, and we generally post on our individual Instagram accounts on Thursdays. We also have a separate account, @iSpyPantone just for tracking this project. I suspect our ideas will evolve over the year, so I hope you’ll follow along!

~Leslie