My Project 365
As some of you may know, lately, I’ve become more interested into photography again. I’ve been taking pictures on and off, especially when traveling, and of special events. But I haven’t been actively working on improving my technique for a while.
Enter JP and morgamic, whose excellent pictures (and perhaps some lens envy) kept inspiring me to get out my camera over and over again. Just recently, I also started filling the gaps in my lens collection: I now have the ability to take pictures anywhere between 14 and 200mm focal length (before the crop factor), dramatically widening the range of pictures I can take.
So what better than a little photo project to keep the ball going? I came across Project 365, whose premise is simple: For a full year, take a picture every day and share it with your audience. All right, I’m in!
All other rules you get to pick yourself, with some people also suggesting to create some “anti-rules” as to be realistic and keep it a fun and achievable project, so here we go:
- I’m going to do my best to take a photo a day, and upload (and blog) it somewhat close to the time I am taking it.
- If I take a bad photo, I won’t beat myself up about it.
- This includes cell phone pictures. In fact, limitations of the equipment are probably what makes this even more fun to do.
- If I really didn’t take a picture one day, I’ll fill in one from my archive. Or improvise. We’ll see!
My personal goals are to increase my knowledge of photography and my ability to take good pictures — not only with expensive equipment. So I’ll try to flip settings on and off, apply filters, get closer, move further away, crop, or distort my pictures, hoping to find new and exciting ways to display reality.
Feel free to follow me on my journey, and don’t be shy to comment, both positive and negative, on the photos I take.
Oh, and if you are a photographer yourself, feel free to join in on the fun! Any questions?
[...] first shot in my Project 365. People going on a walk on a cold, but sunny December 30 in [...]
This is a pretty cool idea.
I might just try over the next 23hrs until New Years and convince myself to do something like that. If for no other reason than to force myself to find something every day to photograph either by noticing the mundane and overlooked in my routine, or doing something outside the ordinary to get something to shoot. Likely 99% cell phone based given how little I carry a real camera. Could be an interesting exercise, even if I don’t make it past 30 days.
Inspiring Fred!
I’ve heard of people doing variations on the 365 day theme (pictures of themselves for 365 days, etc.) and I’ve always thought it interesting, even though I wouldn’t consider myself a photographer, per se.
My main problem is I still haven’t found a competent iPhoto-like app for Linux to make sorting/quick gimp editing/easy uploading possible. Have you heard of any? Or are you using a Mac/something else for this experiment?
Or?
Like Robert, I’m going to spend the next 24 hours hemming and hawing about this…
Excellent, Robert!
To be honest, I am not sure if I will stick with it either — because an entire year is a long time. However, given the availability of cell phones with Internet connection, I am more confident than I could ever have been before that it is an achievable goal. It’s not unlikely that at least the during-the-week shots I will be taking are all from my cell. But since I can edit them later, it should still be interesting. I am going to try out software like Vignette (for Android) to mess with my pics on the fly, too.
Make sure to show me the place where you’re publishing your pictures, so I get to look how you are doing
Preed: Actuallly, I don’t really consider myself a photographer either… I like taking pictures, and I do my best to make them look interesting, but I am far from what you could reasonably call a “photographer”
With regards to tools, I am using a Mac, and I’ve been pretty happy with iPhoto so far, though it has trouble handling a lot of photos in your archive well. But just yesterday I cleaned out my archive (read: offloaded to an external drive and backed up separately), and now all should be well again. I use the presets and features in iPhoto to “fix” photos (like straighten or crop them).
For Linux, there seems to be an instance of Picasa, which I always found to be strikingly similar to iPhoto (not sure if that’s still the case). Of course, it won’t let you upload to anything but picasaweb, but you can always drag the photo that you want to upload out to the desktop and then use the flickr web uploader. For single pictures that should work quite well.
I’m leaning towards attempting this.
I’m thinking of just forcing a simple workflow: iPhone and upload to Facebook, Flickr, and likely blog in the evening hopefully on a daily basis for the most part (iPhoto likely my choice method).
I’m really a terrible photographer, so perhaps this will help me improve slightly. I think the real reason I want to do this is to force myself to look at the world a little differently. With my schedule things are pretty regimented… forcing myself to find something to photograph every day seems like a really good idea. If every shot sucks, but I pause for a moment to notice the quirky bumper sticker, or change in seasons, or occasionally walk a different way to work, I suspect that will be a victory.
[...] and I are going to start the new year with a new project: (try to) take one picture per day — project 365. He has the inofficial rules on his blog post. I think those are rather… [...]
[...] 365. Inspired by Fred, I’m going to try to be more proactive about photography, and take and share a photo every [...]
I’m in:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/king-molan/sets/72157625736379428/
Excellent, Brian! Welcome aboard
I’m in, but I may re-use photos from before. Is that breaking the rules?
Since you get to make the rules yourself, no. (That being said, it seems that the original idea was to indeed take a photo every day, but if you take a photo every day as much as reasonably possible, and fill the gaps with whatever else you find in your archive, why not. Sounds good to me!)
[...] Alright, here we go. Day 0 of project 365. [...]
[...] I’ve been participating in Project 365 with Frédéric Wenzel (who was the first I saw to blog the idea) and Mike Morgan among [...]
[...] been over a month now that I’ve started to take a photo a day (and blog about it). So far, it is going well, though I expect it to get harder as things to take [...]