Thoughts about 365 projects

At the outset, this is not an instruction manual for successfully completing a 365 project. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from more than 20 years of teaching is that – at least in the creative fields – the way one person does things may not necessarily work for another. This, then, is an account of what did and didn’t work for me. Whether it works for you depends in no small part on how similar you and I happen to be.

With that in mind, it’ll help for you to know a little about me and my experiences trying to take one photo every day.

At the bottom of the front page of this blog is an archive list of all entries. You can learn a lot about my successes and failures just by looking at the numbers. For example, the blog starts on January 1, 2015, and first lapses 25 days later. At the time I told myself I was just taking my birthday off. But I swiftly had to admit that I was simply using it as an excuse for missing a day (I generally don’t give a crap about my birthday). Two days later I missed another day without a convenient rationale, and things went downhill swiftly from there.

The rest of the numbers are also telling. The years when I came close. The year when I made it (sorta). When I took a break. When I gave up. When I began again. And of course scrolling through the blog’s actual content shows the good photos, the bad photos and all the photos in between.

Here’s my big take-away thus far: the “take one photo every day” rule is a great help and also a tremendous hindrance.

In a former life I was a lawyer. As a result of the experience (and my basic nature, truth be told), I have a great respect for and skepticism of rules. On another page in this blog you can read the way I originally set up my 365 project as well as some of the modifications I made as I went. 

At their best, the rules made me take pictures. It seems axiomatic but bears stating nonetheless: you can’t be a photographer if you don’t take photos. I’m still amazed at how many students enroll in photography classes without that basic principle in mind.

At my worst, the rules hindered my photography in three ways.

First, I cheated. That wonderful 365 next to 2017 in the archive? More than once (I don’t recall how often), the “photo of the day” was actually taken a day or two later and then back-dated into the blog. I’m a hopeless stat freak, so winning streaks mean something to me. Cheating to keep one alive, on the other hand, bothered me tremendously.

That terrible feeling shoved me away from the project on more than one occasion. So if you’re the sort of person who gets upset when things don’t go according to the strict letter of the law, it’s probably a good idea to set up your rules with some slack built in.

Along those same lines, the second problem I encountered was what I came to know as the 11:55 Crap Shot. At five minutes until midnight, I’d realize that I hadn’t taken a picture yet that day. So I’d swiftly shoot and blog whatever was at hand, typically a knickknack from the desk or bookshelves in my office.

Nor was the 11:55 Crap Shot limited to 11:55. Often at some earlier point in the day I’d think “oh, I need to take a picture today” and again take a quick snapshot of something nearby. When people ask me about the pictures in my 365 blog, one of the first things I say is that any photo of food, a cat or something that looks like it just happened to be sitting on my desk is likely to be the product of an act of desperation.

That’s counterproductive. We don’t grow as photographers by regressing into the realm of snapshots. The essence of the art is to truly see the world around you (and have the technical skills to make a record of the world that reflects your vision). Every day we should all be able to pause long enough to focus on something (anything, really) long enough to turn it into a genuine photograph. A daily practice of pressing a shutter button doesn’t do that, at least not all by itself.

My third problem was a tendency to consider the day done once I’d taken a picture. I’d photograph something random, and then if I saw something else photo-worthy later I’d say to myself, “that thing will probably still be there tomorrow, and I’ll need another photo then.” I can sift through the collection and rapidly come across images of objects I photographed literally the day before they disappeared. And of course the set doesn’t feature any pictures of the things I missed because I assumed incorrectly that they’d still be there.

So that’s me as a photographer. In the years since I first began this blog, I’ve moved slowly from “take one picture every day” to “take a picture every time I see something worth taking a picture of.” On any particular day that could be dozens of things or nothing at all. I’m still not where I’d like to be, but at least now I have a goal I can live with.