Project 365: A Photoblog

They all say prac­tice makes per­fect. When I first heard about Project 365 upon stum­bling upon the pho­to­blog of Dustin Diaz, I was com­pelled to start my own. I dug deeper and found a 2006 arti­cle about it on Pho­to­jojo: Project 365: How to Take a Photo a Day and See Your Life in a Whole New Way — appar­ently the idea wasn’t new at all.

I had my reser­va­tions at first — would I be able to keep up, would I have the deter­mi­na­tion to not miss a sin­gle day, do I already take pho­tos that are actu­ally wor­thy of post­ing daily, etc. Then there are con­cerns that I haven’t yet fully mas­tered the poten­tial of shoot­ing with a dSLR.

It can be really demo­ti­vat­ing when a whole set of pho­tos doesn’t turn out to be up to your expec­ta­tions. LCDs can only tell you so much. Its only when you down­load them all into your PC where you can view them in their full under/overexposed, out-of-focus glory. Of course, lessons are learnt and I cer­tainly would not expect to be a decent pho­tog­ra­pher overnight, but the high rate of fail­ures kept me from jump­ing into start­ing a Project 365 photoblog.

But the Photojojo’s arti­cle I stum­bled upon directly addressed my con­cerns and lists a few extra ben­e­fits of start­ing such a project:

• Imag­ine being able to look back at any day of your year and recall what you did, who you met, what you learned… (Often we find it hard to remem­ber what we did just yes­ter­day or even last night, let alone a whole year ago!)
• Your year-long photo album will be an amaz­ing way to doc­u­ment your trav­els and accom­plish­ments, your hair­cuts and rela­tion­ships. Time moves sur­pris­ingly fast.
• Tak­ing a photo a day will make you a bet­ter pho­tog­ra­pher. Using your cam­era every day will help you learn its lim­its. You will get bet­ter at com­pos­ing your shots, you’ll start to care about light­ing, and you’ll become more cre­ative with your pho­tog­ra­phy when you’re forced to come up with some­thing new every sin­gle day. #

While moti­vat­ing, I still had con­cerns if I should find myself giv­ing up halfway. Luck­ily the edi­tors at Pho­to­jojo fore­saw this and even men­tioned there’ll def­i­nitely be days where peo­ple con­sider giv­ing up and such. So they offered tips on how tackle that, too.

Upon fin­ish­ing that arti­cle, I felt there is no rea­son I should not embark on this project. It’s a big com­mit­ment, yes. And I fore­see the final exams sea­son which I would obvi­ously have min­i­mal time with my cam­era let alone going online, but let the future decide for itself shall we?

So I decided to take that plunge.

I whipped up a quick and sim­ple dark-coloured theme and slapped it onto a sub­do­main of tehCpeng.net — img.tehCpeng.net — which is the address of my spank­ing new pho­to­blog. The sharp ones amongst you would already know that ‘img’ is short for ‘image’. I ini­tially used that sub­do­main to point all my images (I still do), but I couldn’t think of a bet­ter name for the pho­to­blog. ‘photography.tehcpeng.net’ was a lit­tle too long, ‘photoblog-’ is way too generic. So I set­tled with the short and sweet, ‘img’. =)

I’ve started off my Project 365 with a photo from the 1^st of Jan­u­ary (1/365), fol­lowed by a skip to 19^th of Jan­u­ary as 2/365. That makes the photo I’ll post later on today (crap it’s already after mid­night!) 3/365. Don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of this later on.

So what are you wait­ing for? Head on over to

img.tehCpeng.net

*shame­less plug*