Hello Chris! I love reading your newsletter. I’m specially interested in the photo diary post. How do you start one? Is there a fixed number of images that you need to make every day? I work from home and my average day can be pretty boring if I don’t step out. How many of these images are “created” vs. “documented”? And when I say created, I merely mean are you doing things outside of your regular routine to make more interesting images? Or is the point of the exercise simply to document your daily routine as is? And what tips do you have for someone who would like to start this as a practice?
Hi Ariana~ Thank you, I'm glad you're enjoying it! Lots of good questions here. I've set this particular daily project as taking and sharing one photo a day for the course of a year. Sometimes I'll take a few dozen photos, sometimes only one or two. I initially thought I'd be taking plenty of photos each day and that I'd be able to just pick one to share. But I've come to realize I'm just not documenting everything I do that fastidiously. So as the project goes on, I find myself creating images a little more often. This might mean walking around at night with a flash in my neighbourhood looking for something interesting, or scouring my apartment for someway to make it feel unfamiliar. I don't have a percentage of created vs documented, but after 300 days this year there's a good number of both.
My initial reason for starting was an intention to document my life a bit better, and to a large extent that's worked. But I want my photos to feel like something special, not just a snap, and this has slowly influenced the photos I've taken for the project. At some point I realized I had a lot of darker, sort of odd images. I saw the potential for a little print project in that, and so I started leaning into photographing more of that subject matter. In other words, the things I photographed developed during the course of the project.
Here are my tips:
*Try find a place to share the images, knowing someone else is watching really helps keeping you dedicated to doing it daily. I created a new IG account, made it private and told a few friends. If I missed a day, they'd let me know all about it.
*I use a small point and shoot and send the photo to my phone for posting. Other than shooting on the phone itself, it makes the whole process as smooth as possible by not having a computer involved.
*Treat the first month or two as a chance to figure out what you like. You can focus the project as you go.
Hello Chris! I love reading your newsletter. I’m specially interested in the photo diary post. How do you start one? Is there a fixed number of images that you need to make every day? I work from home and my average day can be pretty boring if I don’t step out. How many of these images are “created” vs. “documented”? And when I say created, I merely mean are you doing things outside of your regular routine to make more interesting images? Or is the point of the exercise simply to document your daily routine as is? And what tips do you have for someone who would like to start this as a practice?
Hi Ariana~ Thank you, I'm glad you're enjoying it! Lots of good questions here. I've set this particular daily project as taking and sharing one photo a day for the course of a year. Sometimes I'll take a few dozen photos, sometimes only one or two. I initially thought I'd be taking plenty of photos each day and that I'd be able to just pick one to share. But I've come to realize I'm just not documenting everything I do that fastidiously. So as the project goes on, I find myself creating images a little more often. This might mean walking around at night with a flash in my neighbourhood looking for something interesting, or scouring my apartment for someway to make it feel unfamiliar. I don't have a percentage of created vs documented, but after 300 days this year there's a good number of both.
My initial reason for starting was an intention to document my life a bit better, and to a large extent that's worked. But I want my photos to feel like something special, not just a snap, and this has slowly influenced the photos I've taken for the project. At some point I realized I had a lot of darker, sort of odd images. I saw the potential for a little print project in that, and so I started leaning into photographing more of that subject matter. In other words, the things I photographed developed during the course of the project.
Here are my tips:
*Try find a place to share the images, knowing someone else is watching really helps keeping you dedicated to doing it daily. I created a new IG account, made it private and told a few friends. If I missed a day, they'd let me know all about it.
*I use a small point and shoot and send the photo to my phone for posting. Other than shooting on the phone itself, it makes the whole process as smooth as possible by not having a computer involved.
*Treat the first month or two as a chance to figure out what you like. You can focus the project as you go.
I hope some of that helps!
Thank you so much for sharing! This is super helpful to learn. Excited to start a mini project of my own!
Love that first one. I’m a sucker for photos through windshields.
Cheers Travis, I read your newsletter about shooting from your car a few months ago. It’s something I seem to do more and more~
Yeah I love it. I like the frame-in-the-frame thing that happens.