My 365

I did my test run a little bit ago for a 365 day photo project, trying to see if it was realistic with my life schedule and different responsibilities, and I came away confident that I can pull it off.  For those who you still unaware of what a 365 day photo project is, it’s where a person makes a committment to take a picture every day for an entire year.  Not every other day, or when they feel like it, but every day.  The point is to inpsire and push oneself to be further involved in the craft of photography, since most of us sometimes get a little lazy and don’t take any photos for long stretches of time.

I’ve gone through that door many times: I get so caught up in photography related stuff that it takes most of my extra attention, and then there are periods where it gets so little attention you’d think my camera might make me sick or something.  I want to grow as a photographer, creatively and technically, and this seems like a pretty cool way to do it.  I was a little nervous of the idea at first, but, my wife and a few friends have really been encouraging so I’m gonna tackle this thing and see what I come up with.

Here are my ground rules, and I’ve thrown in some things to spice it up:

1. A picture must be taken everyday.  Not two or three in one day and then spreading them out, but one each day.
2. A day is defined as the period between when I wake up and go to sleep (got to account for late nights, ya know?)
3. I’ve got to try and post the picture the same day, but I’m not going to be too rigid on this.  Sometimes that may not workout.  So you may get two pictures in one day, but not because I didn’t take it each day but due to not being able to get it up here on the blog.  This is probably going to happen a lot when I go out with my unit or when my wife and I go out of town.
4. The project will start tomorrow, March 31st and will end one year from now on March 31st, 2011.
5. I’m allowed to use whatever means I have to take a photo, with one catch: I can use my camera phone no more than 52 times throughout the whole project, giving me an average of one use per week.
5. This is what’s going to make it really interesting: I’ll have a theme I have to stick to each week*.  They are going to go from typical to crazy, all in the name of expanding my horizons and comfort zone.  This is what’s going to really make this something special for me, and I’m going to need help with themes since there are 52 weeks in a year, which means I need 52 themes and so far I haven’t come up with anything even close to that.

That’s it.  Those are the rules.

Now, each week on Tuesday night/Wendesday morning, I’ll announce the week’s theme (since I’m starting on a Wednesday, the “week” will begin on a Wednesday).  If I have any special requirements besides just a theme, that’s where I’ll mention them.  Also, to help anyone new who comes along follow this project, I’m creating a new “My 365″ category in the topic category menu on the right hand side of the site.

And in the interest of curiousity, here are all of the themes I’ve come up with at this point and time that I’ll be using:

1. Strangers- this whole week I’ll have to take pictures of nothing but strangers (probably a LOT of street photography)
2. Natural light portraits
3. One light portraits
4. Movement- something showing people moving in some capacity or pictures showing the concept of movement.
5. Pro bono portrait for friends- this’ll work on my charity side of photography
6. Pro bono portrait for strangers
7. Details (???)- the “???” will be something specific, like “cars”.  Then I’ll spend the whole week taking pictures of car details. You get the idea.
8. Unusual locations- pictures of, well…. unusual locations. Kind of open ended.
9. Pictures inside my house but actually incoporating the house (furniture, kitchen, something, anything inside my house)
10. Pictures outside- incorporating the outside environment in some way
11. Taking a photo that I made earlier in my photographic endeavours and improving it somehow.
12. Freebie/Goal- I’ll use this on those weeks when a theme just doesn’t work due to schedule/location/acts of God/etc., and instead I’ll just have a goal for a certain picture or series of pictures that wouldn’t be possible to do for a whole week.  I’ll try not to use this too often, but expect to see it more than a few times.  As an aside, I’ll be sure to make the goal something worthwhile.

That’s it.  That’s all I’ve got.  I had more but I didn’t write them down and now they’ve escaped me.  Hopefully I can remember them. 

*There is one concern I have about the themes, though.  I’m worried that, since I’ve never experimented with this and, to my knowledge, no one else has tried this, that it could become too overbearing to where I’m restricted on what I can photograph and end up becoming stuck because of a lack of time or capabilities to fulfill the theme’s requirements.  If this ends up being the case, I’ll go ahead and say so and I’ll move to having goals each week that I’ll try and meet that will be similar to a theme, but not as restricting (it won’t cover every day).  But I’m hoping the theme idea pans out.

I’d appreciate any support out there as I go along, and please, if you have any reasonable ideas for a weekly theme, drop me a comment with your idea.  I’d appreciate it.  Otherwise, tomorrow kicks off Day 1 and we begin our year long journey.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 30th, 2010 at 10:29 am. It is filed under My 365, My life, Photography and tagged with 365, blog, camera phone, day, jacob, jacob vorpahl, one light, photo, Photography, portrait, portraits, pro bono, project, rules, strangers, theme, vorpahl. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.