I’m jumping back on the 365 train. I’ve just felt off since the project ended, and I’m afraid I won’t have a good record of the year if I stop taking daily photos. I’m still going to do a 52 weeks project but I tweaked it a little bit (and no, not self portraits – I did waaaaay too many of those in high school and college to start again), so look for the first installment on flickr on Friday and every Friday thereafter.
I feel better already.
For months, I’ve been counting down the days until my 365 project was over.
I loved making myself take photos everyday. But some days, there was nothing I saw that I liked. And other days, I forgot until 11pm at night.
I loved getting into the habit of having my camera with me all the time. The few times I decided not to take it with me, I always saw an unbelievable shot I couldn’t capture. I realized that the light in our house sucks, and that I love my 50 mm portrait lens.
Some days I took hundreds of photos, and had a tough time deciding which one summed up my day and experiences. And some days, it was a chore to even get one photo I semi-liked.
I have a lot more photos of my kids. But, I still have very few that are in focus.
There were only 5 days I completely missed, which feels like a success to me. I plumb forgot on a few of those days. A couple of those days I skipped on purpose as I remembered at 11:30 at night, my camera was outside in the car, and it was pouring rain.
I imposed unfounded standards on myself. I decided I didn’t want any blog photos to also be 365 photos. This made it harder to blog.
Some photos felt like the art photography I used to do. Some photos felt like silly snapshots.
I really learned how to use and adjust my camera settings without having to read the manual from cover to cover. It might have taken less time just to read the manual, but now I really understand and know from all my practice and mistakes.