365 Photo Project: Halfway Checkpoint

At the beginning of this year, I decided (at the last minute!) to embark on a “take a photo every day” journey. I had never done anything like it before, and thought it would be a fun way to learn and practice photography (i’m still a n00b).

At first, to ensure I make good use of my DSLR, I would set aside time each day to go out and shoot. Unfortunately, due to school and work, this very quickly turned into “well, my cell phone camera is more convenient most of the time, so i’ll use that too”.

This naturally caused a mix of different styles of photos: some ‘artsy’ ones, and some ‘random/normal’ ones. Some days I would have many photos to choose from to be “the photo”, and other days, I had only one photo the entire day.

…my photo 365 project has become essentially a visual life documentary…

Since my only rule of this assignment was that each photo must be taken on a different day, I was scared at first that I would forget to take a picture one day and blow the whole thing. Thankfully this has not been much of an issue, mainly because since I started, my goal of this 365 photo project has slowly evolved.

My original idea of doing this was to practice photography in the traditional sense: framing, composition, technique, camera settings, etc… This is good and all, and most of the days I really think about those things more thanks to this daily activity, but that is not what it has turned out to be.

By artifact of not having much time to set aside to do “photography”, allowing “mediocre” cell-phone pics, and doing batch uploads once or twice a week, choosing from a handful of photos to be the “photo of the day”, my photo 365 project has become essentially a visual life documentary.

I’m lucky this shift happened early on, because each day, I’m conscously thinking about the photo I will use to describe that day. Amost all of my photos now, (excluding some early ones and a few “oh crap, I almost forgot” ones) are pictures I selected to represent the most significant event of that day.

Forget Facebook (I’m not on it anyway!), I have my own personal, visual, daily timeline that I created!

I already envision a neat end of the year task I can do: create a “year in the life of” video slideshow of all these daily pics (plus a few more from better days) as a fun way to summarize what I did in 2012.

TLDR; This daily photo challenge, for me, is a fun way to create a visual summary of each day. I recommend it to anyone with a camera, wether it’s to get better at taking pictures, document your life, or both!