TL;DR:
January 1, 2022 marked the completion of 10 years taking a photo every day!
A 10 year milestone is a nice time to wrap this up and shift my focus to other exciting photo projects 🙂
How it began:
Back in 2012 I began a simple challenge: take at least one photo every day. Some photographers try to do this for 1 year, as a fun way to practice. I also originally began this “photo project 365” as a way to force my self to go take pictures each day with my new DSLR.
Very quickly, the project became a lifestyle, and morphed from “let’s go take a picture with my new camera” into “let’s just take many photos each day, and go back and select the most representative photo for that day”.
Basically, I discovered photo journaling, and this became my new way of living. I came to instinctively think about making sure I take a photo sometime every single day, so that I could go back select the one that best represented that day (or the photo I thought was most artistic).
Some days, I had so many pictures to share that it was hard to choose , while other days I end up with extremely ordinary/boring photos. Therefore, this rule sometimes inspired me to be more aware of how I spend my days, so I could keep my photos – and life – more interesting :).
Little did I know that I would end up doing this for a whole decade!
10 Years later…
and 46K+ total photos later… totaling 3653 photo-of-the-day selections (10*365+3 leap days).
This 10 year photo documentary is available on my instagram @mcclanahoochie365 and on my personal website mcclanahoochie.com/365 – an archive of my actual daily life for the past 10+ years!
I even created a giant hyper-speed slideshow video on YouTube (~12mins long). Now, this isn’t the best way to showcase my best photos, so I will probably make a highlights reel or post for those separately – stay tuned!
Stats for nerds
…all of these pictures were compressed down to just 1 shared per day.
This is also the first time I’m seeing this data, because it was created while writing this post. The most pictures seem to come in the spring/summer, mostly correlated to traveling.
Lessons learned
The Good:
Forcing myself to take a photo every day actually did lead to some good pictures that I like that would not have been taken without a constant photo search mindset.
It also forced me to be more creative in my photography, both in what to capture and how to post-process.
Looking back at literally a years worth of photos (especially over multiple years) is very rewarding, and can bring back fun memories.
For these reasons, I can recommend giving a photo-365 project a try for any consecutive period of time (1 month, 6 months, 1yr..). A similar project is the 52-week project (one photo per week for 1 year).
The Bad:
Instagram is NOT suitable as an archiving tool >_<. It is designed for recency, not for hosting a searchable library of pictures. That is one of the reasons I kept my personal site around, so I could query specific days in the past. On Instagram, it is impractical to scroll back to my first picture in 2012.
The side-effect of forcing a photo onto each day is that I shared a lot of pictures that were just, ‘meh’. Maybe not every photo deserves sharing (see next section).
Moving forward
After some long reflection, I’ve decided to not continue doing the photo a day project – or at least the posting of daily photos. I’ll probably continue to instinctively take photos every day (after all it’s a 10+ year habit), but I found that over time, the posting/sharing of the images started to be a burden.
I realized I spent a disproportionate amount of time editing a boring photo (one taken on an uneventful day), trying to make it better, rather than editing the actual good photos that I took (on a different day). I had created an unconscious, unattainable goal of trying to only post masterpieces, yet limiting myself to a 24 hour time window and molding the photos around whatever I did that day, instead of making my day more photogenic.
To be fair, a few of my favorite / best photos only happened because I had developed the mindset of constantly looking for photo opportunities (some even made it to Chromecast!), but I have proved to myself that not everyday’s photo is worth sharing.
I look forward to this new year, with a slightly shifted perspective about taking daily photos: I will refocus my energy on curating, editing and sharing quality over quantity from now on 🙂
Stay tuned…
Links
instagram @mcclanahoochie365
personal website mcclanahoochie.com/365
youtube slideshow video: