365 days, 1 photo per day. It might not sound that complicated, but let me tell you, a 365 Photo Challenge is nothing to shake a stick at. Through sickness, long work hours, holidays, I was there, taking a picture. Since I needed a bit of direction to keep me going throughout the year, I decided to do what is called a Shooting Calendar. I wrote down 31 words onto pieces of paper, put them into a glass jar and each day I would pick a word to photograph. At the end of the month, I would start over and shoot the words again. Some words don't have as many photos because of the shorter months. A couple of times I put the word back into the jar by accident and shot it twice that month, but I made sure to pull that word the next month to even things out. To make things even more interesting, I decided to only use one lens/camera for the entire month. There were definitely lenses that I struggled with, curse you Petzval!, but there were also lenses that I absolutely fell in love with, I'm looking at you 35-350mm! I couldn't stand the inaccuracies of the Instax camera or the ridiculously small images it produced; about the size of a business card. I had some issues with my Polaroid 100, I can't blame a 50 year old camera for being a little finicky, but by the end of the month, I hit my stride with it.
What I learned about myself as a photographer during this photo challenge: I am such a macro photographer, it's not even funny. I like to zoom in and fill the frame. I love smooth bokeh. When I took the time to set up the photos with good lighting, I loved the result; I wish I had taken more time to do that, but you know, life. My advice to someone that's thinking about this challenge? Pick good words. I had a few in mind, but I asked friends to give me some suggestions. I'll probably never photograph a keyboard again as a result of this. But I'm really glad that I did it and I'm pretty excited to show you the results.
I put all the photos for a particular word into a collage for you to check out. Here are 365 photos for you!
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