Now why would we want to do this? Because we love shooting and we love to motivate others to shoot too. This isn't as easy as it sounds. We have lives that require us to be involved. Work, school, kids' sports and recitals, illness. All sorts of things get between us and our cameras. I shoot a lot, and yet, I still have many days when I don't want to pick up a camera. But if your counting on me, and I'm counting on you, we'll press on. We are making a commitment to each other.
Now, with that said, there may be times, that although you took a picture, you didn't have the ability to upload your images. Are you going camping? Staying at an Aunt's house in Utah with no wi-fi? That's okay. The group is set up so you can only upload 1 image per day. When you come back to town, create a collage image of one picture per day that you were gone. Please don't forget to include the day you return.
Are you still with us? Awesome. This will be fun. And we hope for a lot of participation. We also like the fact that Faded & Blurred has members all over the place, that might not be able to make it to our events. Here is a great way to show us what you shoot, what you love, what your daily life, town, family, or routine looks like.
As for us, only Nikki has done a 365 project before. She posted a blog about it at the end of the project, and then she updated her thoughts when we mentioned we wanted to start this. Here were her thoughts then:
"I started this project one year ago with a bunch of friends on a lark. I had never really taken pictures before except typical snapshots of family or vacation shots. It sounded like it would be a fun challenge for the new year and a way to keep in contact with online friends. I had no idea how life-changing it would be for me. This year has been one of the hardest I have ever gone through. At times I wasn’t sure I was going to survive it. The one constant has been photography. It has been a therapy for me that I could not have imagined. I pick up the camera and my world disappears. It is a magical feeling. I haven’t kept track, but I know that I have taken at least 7000 pictures over the course of the year. I have not missed one day of posting. Some days it has been all I could do to think of one picture to take, let alone find a decent one to post. Others it has been hard to pick just one."
Here are her thoughts now:
"I went the entire year taking a photo and posting every day. It was a fantastic learning experience that I think every photographer should do at least once, especially if you are looking for an exercise in self-discipline. It is not, however, something you want to enter into lightly. It is difficult... some days it's nearly impossible. You start looking around your neighborhood thinking you've taken every possible shot you can and there is nothing left. You get tempted to use shots from long photowalks for the rest of the month since you took 400 in one day, but you realize that would be cheating since the idea is to force yourself to not just post a shot a day, but to shoot everyday as well. Then there are days when you get "the shot"... when you think this is what I have to do the rest of my life because if I don't I'll just sit in a corner rocking back and forth unable to function. That is when it is all worth it. That's when you know why you took the challenge."
Another fun thing to see and witness is the difference a year makes in our progression as photographers and artists. How far we will go with technical skills, experience, post processing, all of it? We will have benchmarks, a beginning and an end. I love that!
Here are some more articles on 365 projects:
You can also do searches on flickr for 365 to see what others are doing.
So, are you ready? One picture a day. That's all we ask. See you on 1/1/2010 right here: Faded & Blurred 365
