Project 365: One Month Retrospective

With my photo of the sunset yesterday, I marked the successful completion of the first month of Project 365.  Out of 31 days in January, I took at least one photo every day.  So far, the project is at once both easier and more difficult than I expected.

Day 8 was the only day last month that I only took one photo. It was a busy day, I ended up working late, skipped a knitting guild meeting, met Matt for a late dinner and snapped one photo outside in the freezing cold while walking back to the car.  The rest of the days left me with a selection of photos to choose from, even if the selection was sort of strange.  I’ve learned that it’s not so hard to tote my camera everywhere, and I’m becoming more comfortable with pausing to pull out the camera when I see something interesting rather than worrying whether I’m in the way, if people will think I’m weird and touristy…or wondering if I’ll freeze to death.

I ran into two main problems while working on my project in January.  The first is seasonal and, while out of my control, I probably should have anticipated it.  The month of January in Boston is a pretty dark month. We have short days and long nights this time of year, and I spend most of my daylight hours in an office.

As a result, I found myself sitting at home with my camera on many an evening wishing for better indoor lighting and more hours of daylight.  I took a lot of still life photos this month so that I could slow down the shutter speed and let in as much light as possible. January is very heavy on macro shots and pictures of random things around the house.  I learned that I hate how my camera captures most colors at ISO 1600 (darks and blacks all seem to pick up grainy blue stripes instead of clear colors – I’m just not a fan of noise, especially in color photos), and strived to keep my ISO set to 800 or lower to cut down on unsightly noise artifacts in my photos. This meant rather slow shutter speeds indoors if I wanted to photograph anything more lively than a book.

The other problem that I’ve been working through is creative inspiration. Again, I should have known that coming up with a creative photo every day would quickly become difficult, but when embarking on this project I thought more about the challenge of learning about my camera than I thought about finding subjects to put in front of it.

I told myself that I wanted to keep photos of cats and knitting related items to a minimum because it feels like an easy way out.  I’ve had more of those items than I’d like in the past month of photos, but when I do resort to the “easy” subjects I’m trying to think of different ways to see them (sometimes more successfully than others).

I’ve really been enjoying this aspect of the challenge because I feel like even more than basic camera skills, this is an area where I already feel myself growing from the experience of this challenge.

To be fair, some days when I feel uninspired, I end up with a photo of a plecostomus fish belly in the tank at the local sushi joint that just doesn’t scream inspiration to me. On the other hand, some of my favorite photos from the last month are direct results of evenings where I’m not feeling the creative spark. This is a photo I took on one of my least inspired evenings in January:

In desperation from the low-light situation, I turned on the spotlights and fiber optic lamps in our china cabinet, and started snapping anything in the china cabinet that looked remotely interesting. If I hadn’t been wracking my brain to think of an interesting shot for Project 365, I never would have taken this photo because I would have been sitting on the couch watching House instead of wandering around the dining room with a camera glued to my face.

So far, that’s the coolest thing I’m taking from this experience – I’m working on trying to see everyday items in a more interesting way through my camera lens, and I’ve had some good breakthroughs. I’m really looking forward to the next 11 months!

You can see the rest of my photos from January by visiting either my Project 365 Blog (larger photos) or my Flickr set.