365 Photo Projects are a relatively simple concept: Take one picture, every day. Depending on who you ask, you should post them somewhere. Others will say take them and put them in a folder.
I’ve tried doing this several times over the years … The past ten years, actually.
I got my Canon 70D 10 years ago. I bought it on February 27th, 2015; got it on March 3rd; and it took me a couple days to figure out how to work it so my first picture was taken on March 7th. I was scared, for some reason.
It was my first real camera. I’ve had several smaller ones over the years, but this was the first one with interchangeable lenses.
I’ve wanted one since I was a kid but never could afford it. My brother had an AE1 and a photo lab in the basement. I’d flip through his copies of Popular Photography and dream about all the gear I wanted to get when I grew up.
I couldn’t help but dream.
Canon has an office right off exit 8a of the NJ Turnpike. They have a billboard, that, every once in a while, would have a new camera or maybe their lens collection. Just to get a glimpse of that was heaven. All those years driving past it on the way to pick up or drop off my daughter… Again, all I could do was dream.
My mother died on January 19th, 2015, 4 days before my 46th birthday. I don’t remember when we actually buried her, the date but about a week or two later, I started looking at cameras and the desire started burning within me to get one.
I finally snapped because my mom was dead, and I saw my life passing me by. I’m not too sure what my wife said when I actually brought it home. The fear of what she’d say contributed to the delay in my taking that first picture.
I went through all the blogs trying to figure out how to use this thing. Eventually, I came upon the 365 project idea. And, for the next several years, I’d start and stop them.
Historically, my problem has been stuff would come up. Maybe I’d get involved with some photo or video project that would take over. I’d find sites with prompt ideas and I’d get tripped up with them.
Oh, and post-processing was always a drag. I’d take all these pictures and, because I didn’t know Photoshop or Lightroom very well, I wouldn’t feel comfortable posting any of the pics.
I have tens of thousands of pictures and never could be bothered to process them. It’s a lot of work when you don’t have a workflow and have to develop or learn one. Just did a file count, and it’s in the neighborhood of 22,000 pictures that I’ve taken.
So, this time around, I’m going to take both RAW and JPGs. I have no idea why I didn’t think of this sooner. RAWs will give me all the data if I want to process them, and JPGs will allow me to publish them quickly.
So, here’s what I’m going to do.
- Use both my 70d and 5d Mark 4 to take a similar version of the same shot.
- Try to use the same lens on each camera for each shot.
- Take 1 picture each day for a year.
- Post the JPG from each camera each day.
- Feel free to adapt what I do, but make sure I take and post 1 picture from each camera daily.
- Noted exception for traveling
For starters, on this Christmas day, we have a shot of an ornament on our tree of a couple dancing. My wife and I danced a lot today. We don’t normally, but this was before our annual viewing of “White Christmas.”
More later…
