Shooting Calendar Completed!

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!

Nature Hodgepodge

In an attempt to get through my back log of photos, I've organized them into themes. This is the set of nature/flowers I've taken during the spring and summer. One of the best surprises of my shooting calendar photo challenge is how I've learned to love some of my lenses. The majority of these were taken with the Beast, my 35-350mm lens with a close up filter. It actually enlarges things more than my macro lens. I've really embraced manual focusing, which eliminates a lot of the issues the lens has.

An incredible storm rolled in while I was at the office one day and I was lucky enough to have my camera with me.

These are some detail shots of our night blooming cereus plant. Technically, it's a cactus, but it doesn't have any spines. It grows these gigantic flowers that open for one night and fill the house with the scent of vanilla. It's really amazing.

I decided to try my hand at some back yard nature photography. I attached my 2X converter to the 35-350mm lens, making it a 700mm lens at the far end. You have to manually focus with the converter on, so I got some more practice on that. Quite the feeding frenzy with the sparrows.

Finally, I cat sat for my old roommate and she has the most amazing garden and homegrown veggies. I didn't enhance the colors at all, they really pop this much!