And now, some 4 months late, my final throughts on my 365 Day Project.

At the very end of my project there was only really twopos­si­ble  outcomes:

1. I could’ve used the skills learned over the year to launch a semi-successful pho­tog­ra­phy busi­ness; or
2. come away curs­ing the inven­tion of the cam­era and swear­ing never again to step in front of the lens.

The delay from cross­ing the fin­ish line to get­ting this post up should give you an indi­ca­tion as to where I ended up.

That’s not to say that I didn’t totally enjoy my year of liv­ing pho­to­graph­i­cally, and I did, for the most part.

In hind­sight there’s a few things I could’ve done bet­ter to make the whole process smoother.

20/20 Hind­sight and all that stuff

I first heard about the 365 project around the mid­dle of 2007. Mike, Chris and Richard had started post­ing a photo a day in what I orig­i­nally thought was a small localised group on Flickr. When I realised just how much of the Flickr com­mu­nity it encom­passed, I knew I had to be a part of it. And with my 29th birth­day com­ing up I had the per­fect hook (although in hind­sight, not the most opti­mistic): the last days of my youth.

Know­ing just how ter­ri­ble I am at keep­ing to dead­lines I wrote down a fairly com­pre­hen­sive list of  shots to take. Think­ing that if I had a par­tic­u­larly uncre­ative day I could just fall back on that list.

That plan worked well right up until I lost the list. Some­where  around day 30 or so I think. Not the best start to a year long project by any stretch.

Con­trary to any belief  you may hold, I’ve never been that com­fort­able step­ping in front of a cam­era. Com­bin­ing that with my habit of being eas­ily dis­tracted meant that the each daily shot had to be planned well ahead of time. And we know what hap­pens when I try to plan something.

Equip­ment

Except for a few stray shots I pri­mar­ily used my Canon 350D with the fixed 50mm lens. Set to Aper­ture Pri­or­ity (Av) at an F-stop of 1.8.

If you’re rel­a­tively knowl­edge­able  in the ways of cam­eras then you’re prob­a­bly cring­ing right now.

For every­one else, what I did was take 300 odds shots with a depth of field so tight even the slight­est mis­cal­cu­la­tion meant my giant head would’ve been out of focus. So that’s why a bunch of the shots are out of focus.

Light­ing was a big issue as well. Liv­ing in a house designed to block out direct sun­light and com­pletely lack­ing in any real pho­to­graphic light­ing I strug­gled to get pho­tos with less than a sec­ond of expo­sure. For a few months I made do with the harsh yel­low light of my desk lamp, but when it died I was shit out of luck.

Would I ever do some­thing like this again?

If you’d asked me that straight after the project it would have been an emf­fatic no. Forc­ing myself to take self-portraits every day for a year just con­firmed that I have a great dis­taste for tak­ing self-portraits. How­ever, I wouldn’t be com­pletely closed to the idea of tak­ing a year’s worth of pho­tos fea­tur­ing any­thing but me.