Take a picture every day for a year

COMPLETED
10/5/21
This is something I started for 2021. I first saw it on some guy’s website, and it seemed like a straightforward, somewhat unique project for me to do. Though prior to writing this I tried searching up the guy’s website and couldn’t find it but found multiple other examples that people have done, so in retrospect not a particularly unique project.

In general, I’d like for the things I work on here to be at least somewhat off the beaten path which I don’t think this qualifies. One thing I would like to do differently than other versions I’ve seen online is I’d like to show 1 picture from each day as opposed to a greatest hit selection, which is more typical.

I used my Minolta XD for these pictures with a 50mm primes lens plus a macro lens attachment occasionally. I have another camera loaned to me so I may take a few on that for at some of the remainder of the year.

Over the course of this year I’ve periodically gotten film developed, scanned, and edited. Now that I’m about 5/6th through the year and the project, my main takeaways have been:

– the project has been successful in not letting photography fade too far into the background of my life. Without the project, I think would have had more lapses in which I completely stopped thinking about taking pictures and what not.

– there’s definitely been many days where I phoned it in and put very little thought into the picture I was taking. Not all of them suck as bad as I had initially thought, especially after editing but ultimately TBD until I see everything finished.

-again remains to be seen, but I feel as if the more recent pictures tend to be “better.”

-having to take a picture every day led me to take pictures I probably wouldn’t have taken, such as most of the indoors macro lens pictures. I think most of the pictures turned out terribly but it did expose some gaps in my technical skills, which is for sure a good thing.

I’ll keep updating this page as the year goes along and will have a separate link for the actual gallery of pictures.