Week 1

Yay! I made it to the end of the first week! It's only four days, but still...

During week 1 I was trying to focus on patterns. You'll see that I didn't stick to this on every day. I blame this on the atrocious flu that I mentioned in my previous post.

Day 1:
I took this one at the grocery store.

1/100 sec
f/ 5.6
ISO 800
154mm (EF-S55-250mm f/4-5.6 IS II)

Day 2:

I liked the pattern cast onto these bananas by a plain old plastic bin lying around my kitchen.

1/60 sec

f/5.0

ISO6400

96mm (EF-S55-250mm f/4-5.6 IS II)

Day 3:

This was my view for most of the day, thanks to the god-forsaken flu. The view of our downstairs Christmas tree from the recliner. Taken with my Samsung Galaxy S3.

Day 4:

I ventured a whole three feet out of my back door to take this one (again, damned flu). I was hand-holding my camera for this shot, and I definitely should not have been. But it was freezing out and I didn't want to set up the tripod this time.

1/20sec

f/4.0

ISO6400

55mm (EF-S55-250mm f/4-5.6 IS II)

So, no real keepers here, but at least I haven't missed a day yet! Next week, my tentative theme is "Winter".

A new year, a new project

I just deleted half a dozen old blogs that got off the ground and then fizzled, which really makes me wonder why in the heck I'm even considering trying to do this blog (or this project) in the first place. In general, my life currently feels like a mess of loose ends and I just want to take on some kind of a challenge and see it through to the end this time. So, because I'm trying to improve my photography skills, and because every single article I read says that I need to shoot more often in order to improve, I thought maybe I should give a 365-day photo challenge a try. It's definitely big and challenging enough that I'll feel like I've accomplished something if I actually complete it, but not really huge or life-changing.

I'm going to set my own rules here. I have enough of living within everyone else's rules everywhere else in my life, so I'm just going to throw this thing together however I want to do it. To say that I've successfully completed the project, I just need to take one picture every day of 2014. It can be with my DSLR or with my smartphone.

I'm planning to post a weeks worth of photos all at once, at the end of the week, beginning on Sunday evening (1/5/14). Ideally, I'll stick to a theme for each week. Also ideally, they'll all be taken with my DSLR and they'll all be beautiful and astounding works of art. In reality, I'll probably end up with a little of everything, and most likely very few of them will be "keepers", much less works of art.

I'm also considering posting these photos to facebook and advertising to my friends that I'm taking on this project. Obviously, the idea behind that is that there will be added pressure to keep going if I know that there are people who know about my project. Since I'm really not a fan of facebook in general, I haven't made a firm decision on this yet.

I'm also hoping that along the way, I find that I am actually capable of completing something that I set out to do. It's been a while since I did that with anything, and that has me sort of bummed out. I get to the end of a year and look back and feel like I have little to show for all of my frantic rushing around. So, while the primary purpose here is to document my 365 project, I'm hoping this will be an outlet for me in other ways.