Dust swirled everywhere in the wake of a pile of dusty foolscap paper meeting the floor — the perfect concoction for a good, long sneeze-a-thon for the rest of the day. I waited, expecting the worst. Nothing.
I sighed, relieved; and at the stack in front of me waiting to be sorted. I gave procrastination the finger and started rummaging through what’s to throw and what’s still needed — sorted in four piles. Numbers, formulas, workings — must be Math 3. Free-body diagrams, graphs and excel sheets — off to the Machine Dynamics 2 pile. Before long, I was speeding through the pile of notes, tutorials and lab sheets I shoved under the study table the day I finished my final exams concluding Year Two — two months ago.
Everything written on those papers now felt distant. Every time I paused a little longer to examine the scribbles of workings and circuits, memories I didn’t want to associate with again come floating back. Long, cold and silent nights spent cramming for the finals into the wee hours of the morning; whole afternoons spent on one or two math problems; walking into the examination hall the next morning drowsy, nervous, and grossly under-prepared; and then that wave of utter terror as I look down at the questions blankly, head dripping profusely in cold sweat.

I’m Done
Lifeless digits and grades on my computer screen stared back at me three weeks later, mirroring the utter disappointment that was my Semester Four final examination results. Staring at them was me, equally lifeless. Suffice to say, I was looking at my worst results yet, two years into my degree.
As the dust settled, I began to see how this might just be a fitting conclusion to Year Two. A hard slap in the face was what I needed to kick me out of over-confidence and under-preparedness. Because my final two years in degree demands of no such recklessness. With Year Three kicking off tomorrow with a whole new slew of intimidating subjects, only time will tell if this high-price of a lesson was worthwhile.
Hitting the bottom of the stack, I labelled and stacked the useful notes back together before shelving them properly with the rest of the previous semester’s notes. The floor where I was working on was empty once again as I picked up the last pile of notes — the ones to be thrown. I watched as the pile descended into our to-be-recycled paper box, stirring up another plume of dust.
This time I smiled, as I shelved all my worries and uncertainties of the past, shifting my gaze towards Year Three.
by ember in Life, Varsity on 22nd August, 2010 at 11pm, 10 days ago.
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I looked up. Staring at my Machine Dynamics 2 lecturer’s ever so vivid body language as he tried — frantically — to liven up a classroom full of students wearing that unmistakable wtfareyoutalkingabout expression.
Words find themselves hard to stick in one piece as they escape his mouth riding on a heavy Middle-eastern accent. Incomprehensible syllables collapse into hypnotic murmurs that mutes the world into a muffled silence as I resorted to lip-read his 350-WPM bullet-train of sentences. All the awhile drawing my dreamy gaze onto every silent flap, sway and whirl of his arms.
I shifted my focus to the projection screen in front of the class that’s supposed to show figures and formulas and notes but nothing came into clarity. I squinted, but my weary eyes did the opposite — the world around warped into blurriness as my eyelids fell shut at the opportunity.
Large. Blank. Void. Nothing.

Clueless in the morning light.
The mid-term break right now does little to slow down what I feel is our toughest semester yet. Yes, it’s been a whole half of a semester since I wrote anything or uploaded any photos. Speaking of which, I guess I have been taking my liberation off Project 365 a little too heavily.
Endless piles of assignment, tutorial and lab work dictates firing up Adobe Lightroom an unnecessary luxury. What more clicking around with my dSLR. Not that I feel great about it. I left behind readers of my now-dormant photoblog and if I may say so, a following on Flickr that accompanied me through my 365 journey. Danbo’s lying beside my laptop enveloped in a thin but unmistakable layer of dust. Comments such as the one ejana left on my 365 finale shot broke my heart.

Lost in a sea of sand.
My inner shutterbug wants more than anything to get out.
But as they always say: desperate times, desperate measures.
by ember in Life, Photography, Varsity on 30th April, 2010 at 10pm, 4 months, 4 days ago.
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23,000 photos weighing 75 Gigabytes, 2,400 Flickr and blog comments, 32 Flickr explores, 2 campus semesters, 3 term breaks, 27 days of hiatus plus three hundred and sixty-five days later, my Project 365 is a wrap. What a journey it has been!

Done!
I started this project without much expectations, with only the desire to observe the limits of photography with a dSLR. I was brimming with excitement with my new dSLR camera then — though I wasn’t new to photography – but what better way to do that than to dive head-first into this project?
Fast forward a year later, as I hit the upload button on my final shot; hitting the red ‘X’ on Photoshop and then closing my Project 365 folder, I felt a rush of joy that accompanies the sense of liberation. An immense weight dragged off my back. Nothing was more gratifying than seeing the auto-generated completion counter on my photoblog showing a proud, ‘100% done!’ I blinked, for a moment, this is it?
Then the sadness sets in. The shoot-process-upload routine has become a ritual I perform every day to please the 365 gods I’ve devoted myself to for a whole year. Project 365 has become a part of my life. I wake up worrying about what to shoot; space out in lectures thinking of a setup and go to bed relieved that I have the day’s shot done and uploaded. Now a mere click puts all that behind in a blink of an eye.
This is going to take some getting used to, I thought.

Day 183/365: Reaching the halfway point.
Emoness aside, the project is by far, the lengthiest self-motivated long-term endeavour I’ve ever successfully completed in my life. That’s why it’s gonna deserve a good, hard look back on how I did it and the obstacles that plagued it’s entire duration.
Getting that shot
Taking my camera everywhere I go
When I started Project 365, I knew I had to bring my camera everywhere I go. Tugging my camera around during outings are okay, the real obstacle was when I had to inevitably bring it to campus — daily. The last thing I wanted was being labelled a show-off who just can’t help showing off his shiny new dSLR every single day. And let’s face it – a dSLR, even the tiny 1000D – isn’t as unobtrusive. The moment you yank it out, a good number of people within eyeshot would definitely look your way. There are times you’d wish to have a big banner above your ahead bearing the words, ‘I’m on Project 365! Suemeifyoucanttakeit.’

DSLRs are way more obtrusive compared to compacts.
So yes, I brought my camera with me to campus every single day for the past year. It spends most of the day tumbling around in my backpack, only seeing daylight when I’m with my close friends – who’re fully aware of my project – when I see a shot or feel comfortable enough to whip my camera out.
The creative spark
Maintaining a Project 365 stream requires a daily dose of creativity I didn’t have. While there are days chock full of activities and events that ends up in a post-processing nightmare, more often than not there were those boring and uninspiring days that beg of you to give up.
The first thing I’d do when the clock strikes – literally – at the eleventh-hour, is to quickly browse through Flickr’s Explore photos. Granted, not all Explore photos are great ones. Computer algorithms can only do so much to compile a collection of ‘good’ photos every day from the Flickr archive, but there are quite a few legitimately good shots out there daily that might give just that spark.
Then there’s the 100-steps challenge. The idea is to drag yourself and your camera outdoors, walk a hundred steps and start taking photos of anything at the end of your path. I don’t follow the hundred-steps rule that strictly, but I often find myself taking strolls in the garden snapping high and low so I can be done with the day’s photo. There are also days after classes where I take a detour somewhere for a short solo photowalk that can be very rewarding at times.
Danbo saves the day!
Somewhere in the 200’s into the project, I decided to get myself Danbo, an action figure from the manga, Yotsub&! I don’t think I’ve formally introduced Danbo yet, so here goes. In the manga, Danbo is actually a robot costume made of cardboard and was donned by Miura to entertain a curious Yotsuba. Despite appearing only very briefly (a single chapter, to be exact), the robot with geometrical features stole the hearts of many.

Day 334/365: Danbo getting cold feet.
There’s a reason why I thought Danbo would be helpful to my Project. I was intrigued by how expressive — or the lack thereof — Danbo can be. Tilt his head up, he can express anything from being dreamy to excitement. Swing his head back down, he’ll appear downright sad or just simply, afraid. And that sort of flexibility is especially useful when you have to shoot something daily. =)
The Workflow

A typical 365 shot you see posted takes an arm and a leg to produce. Taking the shot itself is just the beginning — the real headache starts in the digital darkroom. The photos go through rigorous polishing work in Lightroom, of which the best of the best are subjected to a stringent selection process before the last photo standing is delivered to you.
Seriously though, there are generally two types of shots I do in my 365 — snapshots and set-ups. Snapshots are usually quick takes of life as it flies by, like that quick moment as a child hands out titbits to a monkey; or candid photos of my friends in the labs. Set-ups are exactly what it means, ideas and subjects that are set-up in advance allowing me to explore different angles and variations in the process.
I use Lightroom for cataloguing and post-processing of my photos. Photos would normally go through adjustments such as white-balance, exposure correction, split toning and curves to name a few. Candidates for posting are then exported in full size and thrown into Photoshop, where sharpening, brushing and any other pixel-level editing are necessary.
The final shot for the day is then exported from Photoshop and uploaded to Flickr via the very useful Flickr Uploadr. While I throw the photo into Uploadr, I’ll do the write-up for the Photoblog post and grab the photo URL from Flickr as it finishes uploading. The moment I hit Publish, the photo would be up fresh on both Flickr and my photoblog.
Read the rest of this entry »
by ember in Internet, Life, Photography on 24th February, 2010 at 10am, 6 months, 10 days ago.
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