project 365: the post-mortem

It's been a few weeks now since I finished my Project 365, and I've been avoiding writing about the year. I feel sort of incoherent these days, and part of me feels like whatever I write won't do justice to the experience. Truth be told, there are only a handful of photographs from the whole year that I'm satisfied with. Not happy, just satisfied, that, given the constraints, were the best I could do in that time and place. I've complained often about the limits of my point and shoot and the difficulty of translating what I envision into an actual shot, but that's only part of the 365 story.

Let me back up a bit.

When I started Project 365 in the dead of January last year, I had no idea what I was in for, really. I wanted to improve my photography skills and find out more about how I felt about taking photos. Lots of photos. Truth of the matter was that I was in a rut (why yes, that would be a rut very similar to the one I find myself in at the moment), and wanted to kick start some creativity. From the beginning, finding inspiration and adequate light proved to be a challenge. There were days when I almost forgot to take a shot (and one day in October when I actually did forget). There were many days when I hated the sight of my camera. Days when nothing worked, when the light sucked, when my photographic efforts consisted of nothing more than pointing the camera at the cat (or at myself). These were the days when I nearly quit, when I wanted to throw my camera out the window, when I wanted to never again think about aperture and shutter speed.

But, just when I felt like quitting, when I was seconds from smashing my camera to bits, the light would change or I would see the perfect shot or things would align just right and what I thought was going to be terrible, worked out to be half decent. So, I kept going even though I wasn't happy with most of the shots I took and I was often frustrated and uninspired. In the end, I managed, except for that blip in October, to take at least one photo every day for a year (366 days, given that it was a leap year). Looking at my photo folders, it turns out that my photo a day project resulted in my taking more than 5000 photos last year.

5000!

That's one of the biggest secrets of photography. Okay, maybe it's not a secret, but it's something that budding photographers quickly learn -- it often takes dozens of shots to get the one shot that you're satisfied, or even happy, with, especially if you're shooting in manual mode. Some days, I simply didn't have the time or energy to do what was necessary to get a shot that I was satisfied with, and I'm mostly okay with that. For me, another aspect of the project, I realised, was a test of focus, of whether I could actually finish something this large in scope. At one point, something like this wouldn't have proven to be such a challenge, but the past few months, years even, I've been scattered. Being able to see this effort through proved to be much needed proof that I hadn't completely lost my marbles.

As I closed in on the end of the year, I began to wonder what would come next. I had a brief moment of insanity misplaced optimism wherein I thought it might be a good idea to embark on a second year of Project 365. I quickly realised that such a decision would, at the moment, be ill-advised. So I took a break. For days I didn't touch my camera. By the end of the year, it felt like my camera was attached to my body. And, for the first few days after the project ended, I felt a slight separation anxiety. I felt like I was forgetting something, missing something. One more than one occasion I woke up in a panic, thinking I'd forgotten to take a shot for the day. There have been days when I've been walking to work and my eye catches something that I think would be a good shot, and I realise sadly that I don't have my camera in my bag. There have only been a few occasions in the past few weeks that I actually turned the camera on and took some shots. The results haven't been particularly good. Truthfully, I think that I needed some time to recharge, but I'm getting that feeling back where I want to be taking photos, adjusting settings, playing with light. I'm starting to get excited about photography again, something I didn't feel much in the last weeks of the project. It feels good.

When I decided against a second year of Project 365, I knew I needed to keep moving forward. It's all too easy for me to complain about my camera, but the fact of the matter is that it's probably going to be quite a while before I can afford a DSLR. So, I need to work with what I have. I'm going to focus on the aspects of photography that I wished I had more time for when I was doing 365. I want to learn more about the fundamental aspects of photography and about how to turn what I see into that finished product. Tied to that, I want to learn more about Photoshop, and editing in general. Armed with a pile of books, a whack of online resources, and a brother who gamely answers my incessant questions, I'm jumping headfirst into the depths of the technical and creative aspects of photography and editing. Hopefully I'll have some decent images to share.