So why did I start a 365 project last year, and what did I learn from my failure to make it to the end of the 365 days?
For a few years most of my photographic output was constrained by external parties, mainly by editors from the various publications I covered concerts for. This meant that the only untreated photos I accumulated we're mostly from my vacations.
Nowadays I don't have any hard deadlines to worry about, but still keep taking a staggering amount of photos each year. So, with all the distractions from my working and private life, I needed to create some artificial deadlines that I could work with. Having a daily deadline to publish a photo seemed like an ambitious but achievable goal!
The standard for a project 365 is that you produce and publish a piece every day for a full year, in the case of photography this means that each day you need to publish a photo taken on that day. For my own purposes I decided that I would publish daily, but draw from my large backlog instead.
To add to the challenge I would also include the technical details of the picture and post processing, and create a caption relevant to the image content, process or any other interesting information.
For someone who is not accustomed to producing texts on a regular basis, or even irregular like me, this proved to be the hardest habit to maintain. For the first two months I was able to keep a regular flow of interesting writings, but when the novelty wore off and the pictures being published depicted common scenes it became increasingly hard to maintain momentum and my posts became irregular.
Eventually I would stop altogether, but still have a growing backlog.
So why try again, and how to make sure I'm not putting myself in a position where failure is almost guaranteed?
The main reason for taking such a challenge hasn’t changed, an extensive backlog of photos that I need to go through, and keep publishing on a consistent basis.
But also the need to force myself to write more, and add information to the images I publish, as I believe that an image with an interesting story is less forgettable than an impressive photo with no context. Also, I want to be more capable of writing on a consistent basis, and get more comfortable doing so. The best way to get better at something is to make it into an habit, and practice consistently and with intent.
This is the declaration of intents for my second try at the Project365.
What am I keeping from year 0, and is going to be new and shiny?
To start I will only promise to publish a daily photo, keeping the technical and processing information, but with a much shorter caption. Perhaps that will consist only of the location, or a basic description of the scene depicted, or even what I was thinking when I was taking the photo. They will always have a title and a location.
To offset the loss of the longer texts that accompanied my images, I am creating a weekly post that will be longer, and go into deeper detail for that image. A picture of the week, that might not be the most impressive photo for that week, but it will the one I have more to say about. This will also give me the opportunity to delve deeper into my post-processing techniques and tools, as well as the thought process behind my style of photography.
Having less daily texts to write should also allow me the time to write a few reviews of the gear and software I use, and also a few books.
Thankfully I also learned a bit about ways to create better processes to be able to keep up, and have the least amount of wasted time/effort.
Also, by making this manifesto publicly will increase my sense of accountability for the project, which should help me see it through to the end.