A thousand days of photographs

Sometime tonight ( or more likely, tomorrow morning, with my schedule) I will post my one thousandth Daily Photo. I am in Chicago, and tonight there'll be election return parties at the University of Chicago (I flew in ahead of a snowstorm just so I can get stuck here and photograph the campus under white), and I'm sure I can get something more interesting than this view out my hotel window.

(I wonder if I could do a Chase Jarvis and have you guess where I'm staying?)

I am seriously rigorous about this little visited blog (about 30 a day), but it organizes my photographic life. Every day I take a photograph, and I pick one to post that day. Except for one day early on, I have not missed a day. I'm going to do another celebration on the day that I make my one thousandth consecutive post.

A key value for me has been, not those days where I'm busy with my camera and I have a lot to pick from, but when I'm bored with what's around me.  I have to force myself to get into the zone and find an image when there is not one readily apparent. I gotta, there's a photo to post. It's changed how I see, particularly when I get into situations where it is my job to find a compelling photograph. Nothing, potentially, is off the table. There are photographs lying about, no matter where you are.

Comments

[Tommy Williams]

I have tried to do daily photo exercises a couple of times in the past but never kept them up. I have started again this year where my current goal is a photo a day for a year (about a third what you have done).

I failed in the past because I kept pushing my expectations higher for the quality of the photo each day. I didn't leave myself room to explore new directions nor did I understand just how unrealistic my expectations were.

So now I am focusing on having something to post each day as the overriding goal, with a secondary goal to explore and experiment and try new things--and try old things, maybe go back to the same area and try variations on the photo I took a few days before. Basically, I am trying to treat the daily exercise as practice.

And a surprising thing is happening (I have managed to take photos every day since the 16th of December): my photos are getting better. Or at least more interesting. I'm taking more photos that I want to look at more than once.

I wish I could remember who told this story, but it's about a college pottery class where, at the beginning of the term, the professor dividing the class into two groups. One group was told that they would be graded on the *quantity* of work they produced--if they produced X lbs of finished pottery, they would get an "A", X-n is a "B", and so forth. The other group was told they would be graded solely on quality. At the end of the term, all the best work came from the group that was simply working on quantity. The practice resulted in better results.

I feel that happening with my photos as well even though it has only been a month and a half or so of daily photography.

[Doug Plummer]

Turning off that internal critic is key. I take a lot of lousy photos. Sometimes I just have to go, "Yep, another lousy photo. There's another. And another." And just let it work through my system, until I can accept that that's my job for the moment.

And the quality of those thousand photos is all over the map too. I'm just going to be better some days than others. If I thought each day had to be better than the one before I'd have been stopped dead in my tracks the first week. I don't know if I'm a better photographer than I was three years ago. I'm just a somewhat different one.

[Robert TIlden]

Good shot of the Shedd. There's a great view of the city a little further out toward the Adler Planetarium. And I'd guess the Hilton Chicago... Enjoy the storm tomorrow- I hope you can get back home- flights might be iffy.

[Mike C.]

Thirty a day? Suddenly I feel like a member of an exclusive club... Congratulations on your 1000.

The daily discipline / quantity thing is 80% of my photography -- every lunchtime at work I walk the same 400 yards, and take much the same ten to twenty pictures, though exactly where these are taken has varied over the years (hey, I'm not totally imprisoned by my own self-imposed task!). Luckily, it is never my job to find a compelling photograph, though it could be said it's the photography that compels me to have a job ...

"I just let it work through my system, until I can accept that that's my job for the moment" -- words of wisdom, indeed. Kind of reminds me of John Cage's "I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry", which some find risible but I have always found inspirational and reassuring.