a girl and her camera

"I tried taking pictures, but they were so mediocre. I guess every girl goes through a photography phase. You know, horses... taking pictures of your feet." ~Scarlett Johansson as Charlotte, in Lost in Translation.



I think I'm finally kicking this cold, so I figured I'd try to get my head around all this picture taking business. Taking a photograph every day for a year sounds simple enough. And I'm sure that if I went looking, what I'm about to say here has been said by others all over flickr and wherever else. So, I'm not reinventing the wheel, I'm just trying to take some pictures.

Let me start this again.

Project 365, Day 13. Not even two weeks in and I've run the gamut of emotions about the whole thing. On the bad days I curse the lack of decent light and resent that I've gotten myself involved in such a project. But on the good days, on the good days I wonder what I ever did without a camera and am halfway pleased with my results. Now, I'm not delusional and don't think that the past two weeks have made me a world class photographer. Embarking on this crazy project was sort of a test for myself. With three hundred and fifty-two days still to go, I'm sure that I haven't seen the end of the cursing and frustration. I do think though having got through the first two weeks, and not having thrown my camera out the window, I think I'm in it for the long haul.



In some ways, the past two weeks have confirmed what I already suspected, I love my camera but it has some its limitations. Then again, so do I. While getting into the habit of taking a photo every day was initially by far the most challenging aspect of this project, dealing with the light, or lack thereof, has been the most practical obstacle. Shooting in natural light is far less problematic when you're using a point and shoot, so the days where I've had ample access to daylight have been more productive as I spent less time adjusting for lighting than in actual shot composition. Really, though, the whole point of the project, at least for me, is to learn, and learn I have. Or at least I'm starting to do.



Usually, if I see something that I'd like to shoot, I get out the camera, make my adjustments, and take the photo. If the lighting conspired against me, the shot never saw the light of day flickr. Now, since doing the actual documentation of the project is part of the process, I need to spend more time making the adjustments so that the final result is something that, even if I'm not altogether happy with, I'm at least not ashamed to post it for the interweb to see.

This is starting to feel a bit like incoherent rambling. I guess all I'm really trying to say is that I'm happy with the project so far and am excited to see how my skills and photographs develop over the next year. I'm already seeing an increased output. Some days I just shoot one thing till I get a decent enough shot. Others, I take photos of a whole bunch of stuff, because I've already got the camera out. This is helping to give me some idea of the level of commitment, talent, and equipment required to do something like this for a living. I'm still a far way from that, but this seems like a good pretest.

At the very least, I'll have an awful lot of photos of the cat.