Photography: An Image a Day

It is doing exactly what I wanted it to do. I wanted to be forced, in a sense, to take photographs every day. When I signed up for the 365 Project – a photograph a day for 1 year – http://www.365project.org/ – that was the reason. I had been looking back through my photos from the winter and found that the days I shot something – anything – were few. As a photographer, that’s not a good thing. While on Flickr, I noticed that people had named their files “213/365” or something else that would indicate that this photo was part of a series. I searched and found this site where you upload a photo a day. It organizes into a calendar format if you wish and also can be viewed as a slide show on YouTube. It’s pretty cool really.

The upside is that you have to take a picture each day to post. The downside is that you have to take a picture each day to post.



Sometimes there’s not much to select from. Take Sunday for example. My choice of images from that day is sparse. That’s not to say that nothing happened. I did a lot of yard work and that was what I was attempting to document with my photos from that day, but I was tired, dirty and hungry. My hands ached from gripping tools and my camera was cumbersome. The shots I managed to get were badly composed and uninteresting. When I look back at it, though, I will know what I did that day: planted the garden.

Some days, well – so much to choose from that it takes me quite a bit of time to decide. Though I haven’t been doing this for very long, I do have a couple of months worth of images piled together to form a chronicle of my life. I tend to default to the photos that, although not always technically perfect photography, tell a story about the day. That’s the point, right? A chronicle of a year in your life.

There have been points where I get to the evening and realize I haven’t shot anything, so I look around. Some days I feel creative enough to rearrange the ingredients for dinner or go sit by the window and watch for some birdfeeder activity. Other days I just go find my daughter and shoot her.

It seems to me that it’s nearly metaphoric, this series of photos and their circumstances. Life is like that, some days there’s a lot going on and so much to choose from and other days, you just get by with what you can manage. Some days in my life, I feel incredibly creative, my mind running from image to potential image and I can’t focus fast enough. Some days I just float through and somehow get from the chaos of the morning to the calm of the evening and there’s not much change. Sometimes everything changes, yet it goes undocumented.

Assignments, whether self inflicted or dictated, make me view things a bit differently, constantly seeking the image I need. With this project, I look for the consummate photo that will tell all about my day, or a little about that moment, but nonetheless trigger a memory that without it, would fade into the crevices of my brain and be dispersed. My hope is that when I reach the end, whenever that may be, I will have a running documentary of the flowers I knew and the smiles I got and the things I’ve seen throughout the year.



I would love to hear from anyone who has attempted such a chronicle. Whether it was to capture your own face for a year or the growth of your garden, or whether you, like I, want to see the jumble of images that is your life.