I finally got to the end of My 365 Challenge for 2017. Last year (2016), I saw a post on Facebook of a friends last photo of his 365 Project. I thought – yep – I’ll give it a go; how hard can it be?
Well it’s a lot harder than I thought!
At the beginning, I had loads of ideas, enthusiasm, and there’s loads of stuff around me to snap away at. The inspiration was flowing in bucketfuls. I even had ideas of for weekly themes, such as using old cameras. I started off with much excitement, and the notion “I’m going learn a lot from this”.
To be honest, there were times when I did learn a lot from it. Notably using it as a means of encouragement to take those photos I’ve been meaning to take for some time. One such photo was a shot of the Pantiles in Royal Tunbridge Wells, specifically after it had rained, for that shiny pavement effect.
One of my favourite forms of photography is light-painting, and My365 spurred me on to experiment with a stencil. I made a stencil of a stick man, and using a strobe, was able to create the illusion of a line of stick men. One around a dome, and another a wee bush in the woods.
For one of the weekly challenges, I dug out my very first digital camera, a Sanyo XPC350.
As time rolled on, I must be honest, the enthusiasm began to wane. Then there we times, when I was simply snapping away at anything for that day, and that made the whole thing seem a bit of a chore.
Another photo bucket list shot – I also managed a 6 AM trip to the local park to catch the sunrise.
From the begging, I chose to post each entry to Instagram, to see how that might work. I did miss some days, but still had to post something, so decided upon uploading a “Whoopsie”, a black image with text, numbering the Whoopsie. Yes, I know it’s spelt wrong, but I think it looks better this way.
I did learn some new techniques. But the biggest lesson of all was: “not every day is a photo day”, least not for me. There are days, when I just don’t feel like taking photos – hence the 50+ Whoopsies
Have you done your 365? If so, comment below and post a link to it – maybe It might inspire me to try again in a few years time 😊