Looking back at Project 365 :: Part Two
PART TWO :: Ideas to keep things interesting
I will be honest: in January, I found Project 365 to be pretty easy, even though the lighting is pretty dire with the short days of winter and the traditional layer of regional cloud cover. The energy from the new year and joining a project that thousands of others were also participating in made me happy to bounce about with my camera and take shots of things I normally wouldn’t. The first month was easy.
February started to kill me. It was a busy month with a fair bit of going here and there, which made it seem like it should be easy to always have something to photograph. And when I was away, it was pretty easy as long as I wasn’t so jetlagged that I forgot what day it was. But it was a month that left me feeling pretty drained and exhausted, so on the days when I was doing my normal drill, working from home, I had more trouble picking up the camera. I missed my first day of taking a picture and immediately thought maybe I should drop the entire project. I didn’t want to call it quits, but it seemed like I was already a failure if I missed a day so early in the year. After much thought, I decided I could carry on with the project by implementing two things: the fake-a-day shot and a weekly personal challenge.
The fake-a-day shot is what I used for those five days I missed in the year. Faking a day is easy: it means taking a picture of something that did not move from yesterday to today. Missed taking a picture yesterday? Today take two. And let one of them be a still-life in your house. A stack of books on the shelf. The inside of your medicine cabinet. Photographs displayed on the wall. Just take a picture of something that was the same yesterday as it is today and don’t worry about it any more. No one will know. And if they do know for some reason, it’s hardly like they can criticise you for it. It’s not like forgetting to pay your taxes. It’s forgetting to take a picture. How exactly can anyone be upset by that except you? So tell you that it’s absolutely fine, fake the day and move on. Disaster averted and you’re still on the wagon.
There is also the cousin of the fake-a-day shot…the lazy-way-out shot. I found it quite helpful to find a few shots that would be easy to the point of extreme laziness but would change throughout the year. There is a tree outside the window of my studio that seems to change almost daily. I think I took eighteen pictures of it in 2008. They all look different, so that’s fine by me. My favourite place to take my camera to get out of the house without going too far is the pond across the street. It’s home to ducks and geese and swans and it’s a peaceful little spot in the middle of the big city. Plus, there are ducklings in the summer! This is grand. The birds at the pond and I have a standing agreement: I give them my stale bread; they pose prettily for my camera. So they appear often in my Project 365 photos, and yet again they are completely different shots. I’m quite tempted to take their picture today as well actually—the pond is mostly frozen and they are all walking on the ice, which is quite sweet, though it makes my toes cold to watch them!
The weekly personal challenge is something I set myself, though there are also places online that will give you challenges if you prefer to take on a challenge with others. The idea is pretty simple—set a theme for the week and snap that in particular for the next seven days. One week I only took pictures of shadows. One week I took seven shots of my feet (something else that is in the January issue). One week I only took photos in the kitchen. One week I put my digital camera away and shot with film. Just little things to keep it interesting. You might thing one week of shooting similar shots could make things even more repetitive, but I found they led to finding creative approaches to each topic, so actually they became more interesting than the free-for-all ‘shoot anything’ approach. The week in the kitchen shocked me the most. Our kitchen is teeny-tiny with a giant florescent light bulb, complete with odd hum. Is that description enough to make you understand why I would be hesitant about taking pictures in there? We have much nicer light and windows in our living and dining room, so even if I need to take pictures of food, I usually take it out of the kitchen and into one of those spots to get things in a better light. I just assumed the kitchen set up wasn’t a good one for photos, and really I assumed this before I ever tried. In forcing myself to take a week of photos in the kitchen, I found that the light in this room is totally different and in the morning, it is actually some of the best light in our home. Never would have realised, but it has just the right angle to be very photogenic. Definitely a week when I learned something new.
As I mentioned yesterday, doing more with Photoshop was also a goal for me and this project gave me plenty to work with. One week the challenge I drew was to create a digital layout from the seven photos. I used this template and finished in a flash. Another week, I added these digital frames to my pictures. In both cases, the end result was way easier than I expected. If you haven’t tried simple digital alterations like this, it’s definitely worth doing one week this year.
To set my weekly challenge, I printed up a list of a bunch of different aspects, cut them up and put them in a jar. Then when I felt like things were getting stale, I just drew a challenge from the jar and did as I was told! You wouldn’t need to do that challenge for a whole week—that was just what suited me. You could just draw a challenge when you had a day when you felt like you needed one. If that seems like something that would make the project interesting for you, you can download my challenge sheet in the format that is best for you—download the challenge list for point and shoot cameras or download the challenge list for dSLR cameras. Just save the file, print it out, and cut into strips. Super easy. The difference is that the point and shoot sheet doesn’t include anything technical—just challenges based on themes and places. The dSLR sheet includes those challenges plus additional tasks that include various technical abilities on your camera.
Of course, taking a year’s worth of photos for me instantly translated in my brain to scrapbooking a year’s worth of photos, which is more than just a challenge to my poor little head. But I came up with something that worked for me—more about that in part three!
xlovesx
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