If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile you would have picked up that I participated in Project 365 last year. What this meant was taking a photo a day and posting it with a group at Flickr. This was a great exercise to participate in as it made me think daily about going outside and taking a photo of something. It was forcing me to remember to always carry my camera with me, and carry it I did. I rarely go anywhere without it these days and it has meant I’ve had the opportunity to take photos of things that I might have otherwise missed.
But that’s not the only thing this project has done. It’s given me the chance to get to know my camera, know which lenses are my favourites, what settings I like to use most, and to look at the same thing in several different ways and from several different angles. This is particularly so for Project 52 which was slightly different. Taking a photo a week of the same object.
Mind you, I didn’t stick with just one photo a day. Once I got into the habit of picking up my camera on a daily basis, I found many things to take photos of. In total I took over 12,000 photos through 2010. Now, there were quite a few ‘bad’ ones in there but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that I was learning from the experience and improving my ability in taking shots of all sorts of things, including birds and wildlife. I can tell you that I believe I’m a much better photographer today than I was 12 months ago. I was given permission to experiment, try things out, make mistakes and learn from them, work out why something didn’t work and so on.
I have had many say to me over the past year how much they’ve enjoyed my photography and wished they could take better shots themselves. Well, I’m here to say, they (and you) can – if you make the effort to get out daily with your camera. Doesn’t matter what kind of camera you have – what matters is that you take the time to get to know it and how to use it. Here is a slideshow showing you what I’ve done so far this year – why not come back and revisit this link from time to time?