The attempts of ~LewisBush to take and upload one photo every day, January 1st 2008 to present.
This project is based on =yellowpumpkin the ghost account of =robertgilbert86
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From the first of November I will be making Sakeofprogress a bit more challenging.

For the following thirty days I will limit myself to a single self-rolled thirty exposure roll of film. That means I have one exposure to record each day. Screw up that exposure, and I screw up that day. Also I won’t be cropping any of the images, so what you see will be exactly what I saw through the viewfinder when I decided to record that day, not what I decided it should have looked like afterwards.

The objective is to force me to start thinking as much as possible about each shot.
Sakeofprogress has stagnated because I’m often too tired or too lazy to make an effort, I want to try and change that.

Obviously there are risks with such a project, and because I don’t want to screw up the last two years of my photo a day project I’ll be doubling up by shooting at least one digital photo each day. However if this month is a success, and it works the way I hope the will I’m seriously considering doing the whole of 2010 in the same way. Twelve rolls, Twelve months.

The attempts of ~LewisBush to take and upload one photo every day, January 1st 2008 to present.

This project is based on =yellowpumpkin the ghost account of =robertgilbert86

So Sakeofprogress has been going for twenty months now, longer than I probably expected when I started out. In a way its now become a little too easy, I really don't have to think about taking a photo each day, it just happens. This is super, it was the original aim of the project to make me photograph more. At the same time though its taken some of the original magic out of it all, and makes me want to complicate the project a little, just to keep things interesting.

One idea I had was to do weeks or months of photographing specific things, portraits was one I was thinking could be interesting, a month of portraits of strangers or the like. I did consider the more traditional Project 365 idea of self-potraits, but since I hate my appearance, and I hate the idea of subjecting other people to dozens of self-portraits, that wasn't really an option...

Another idea was to makeup a 35mm film with 30 or so exposures, and take a single photo each day on that roll for a month. That would force an even higher level of attention than the normal photo a day, in the sense that you would only have one attempt to get a photo each day. If it was crap, you'd be stuck with it. Plus it would probably save me some money on film!

Anyway if anyone has any similar ideas they want to share I'd be very interested. Or if you think this should just keep going as it is, as a straightforward diary like project.

The attempts of ~LewisBush to take and upload one photo every day, January 2008 to present, for the sake of progress.

This project is based on =yellowpumpkin
The ghost account of =robertgilbert86

I set out to take a photo every single day of 2008, and I've done it. I will be continuing this project through 2009, here and over on my Flickr account [link]

Happy New Year

The attempts of ~LewisBush to take and upload one photo every day for a year, January 1st to December 31st 2008.

This project is based on =yellowpumpkin
The ghost account of *robertgilbert86

I’m a week into December now, and SakeofProgress has only another three and a bit weeks to go before it’ll be a year old. I’m pretty surprised I made it this far, the first attempt started in October of '07 was a failure, and I half expected this to be as well. Weirdly though I think the extra emotional investment of setting up a separate account, naming it and dedicating it to one thing helped to pull the whole thing through for me.

Its reached the point that I don’t think about taking photos for it, I just take photos, every single day. This was the original aim of the project, to keep me thinking about photography all the time, keep my eyes open and a camera at hand. It was either going to make me a better photographer, or kill it for me totally. Thankfully (I at least think) its been the former. More interestingly its become a total visual diary of the last year. The other day I spent an hour and a half going back through the photos, reading the blurbs for them, remembering specific days, events, new techniques, gear, places, people, experiences. The last year has, during the good times at least, been rather an exciting one.

So what next? It was going to a photo a day for a year, but I’m almost certainly going to keep going with it. Some people write in a diary almost every day of their lives, it’s a fairly paltry investment in time on my part to take a photo every day, and it seems just as suitable to me. How long it’ll last I don’t know. Once the years up I won’t regard it as a failure to lapse, but I’m still going to aim to make it an unbroken record.

The attempts of ~LewisBush to take and upload one photo every day for a year, January 1st to December 31st 2008.

This project is based on =yellowpumpkin
The ghost account of =robertgilbert86

Its a little odd how this has become so much an act of daily routine, like showering or eating, that I now only rarely have to remind myself to take a photo before my midnight deadlines, and even then it is more often than not due to lack of suitable subjects encountered during the day than that photo taking is far from my mind.

The growing size of the project has started to get me to look towards the quality of each photo much more, but it has also made me start to consider the quality of the project as a collection.. I want to try and make more of an effort to produce something that is consistentin the end, which looks less like an amalgamation of random photos, and instead shows some form of continuing link in terms of style and approach.

Photography is a hard thing to develop a distinct look or style in compared to other visual arts which allow for much more direct control over the material. That said I don’t think theres an excuse for not trying, when I look at the thousands of ways artists, writers, composers and others have managed to slip bits of their identities into their work. Trying to develop that kind of creative identity is probably going to be my next goal.

A pretty big objective then...

Photo a day projects are spreading, check out ~568ml and ~42for365