Learning From One Month of Daily Photos

"A Classic" by D. Travis North

As you may or may not know, on the first of this year (2010), I embarked on a photographic journey.  I committed myself to shooting and releasing one photo every day for the entire year. Such a project is referred to as a Project 365, Photo-a-Day, and so on.  Outsiders may think that participants in such a project should be committed. And while I was up to the challenge, I was not expecting to learn as much as I have – and I’ve only got a month under my belt.  With any intense project such as this, there are advantages and disadvantages.  Though I have only been doing it for a month, I’ll try to shed some light (as I see it thus far) on both.

The Benefits

• Staying In Practice – Shooting every day keeps your creative mind in shape.
• Self Inspiring - Some of the photos you’ll shoot will help to inspire other shots.  You’ll find yourself working within themes, which is a great way to improve.
• Easy Benchmarking - It’s difficult to determine what your weaknesses are, unless you’re shooting every day and have a large quantity of photos to analyze.  Oh wait…you have that.  So you can easily analyze your weaknesses and create plans to improve.
• Sense of Accomplishment – Complete one week of daily photos, and you really feel like you’ve achieved something.
• Establishing a Routine – The only way to improve is to keep shooting.  There’s no better way to ensure you’re shooting often than to establish a routine.
• Small Steps Towards Improvement - Achieving lofty goals requires breaking things down into smaller steps.  A daily shooting schedule helps you to make subtle tweaks towards achieving those goals.

The Hindrances

• Daily Shooting – Possibly the winner of the most obvious statement: Shooting daily means shooting daily.  Sometimes life doesn’t grant you such flexibility.  It will be difficult to complete your shots on some days.
• Mental Drought – Keeping ideas fresh is difficult.  Before you begin such a project, be aware that you will not be happy with all of your photos.
• Time - Time taking photos every day is nothing.  Post-processing and workflow are going to eat up some time.

The hindrance list is short, but these three points are very serious considerations.  A daily shoot is not for everyone.  But for those willing to rise to the challenge, I can attest that there is a lot to learn from such an experience.  I will expand on this list throughout the year as I learn more.