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We all start with lofty goals, right? It’s like the New Year’s resolution of photography. ‘I will keep up with my personal shooting and editing and a 365 will be my motivation’. Then life happens. Client work happens. Tons of things prevent you from keeping up with that 365 project you were so faithfully committed to in January. Daily editing is daunting. Suddenly a month has gone by and you haven’t blogged and it is just too much to catch up on. Come on, it can’t just be me right?
What I describe above isn’t exactly my situation. I love project 365s but I have never really committed to one. I pretty much shoot daily, even edit daily, even post on Facebook daily. BUT I have never really committed to a 365 out of fear of failure. Last year I made my first ‘a year of chloe 2012’ slideshow. To be honest, while it was nice to have those images to document my child, watching that slideshow was more of a demonstration of my growth in photography than a loving memory of Chloe. I could see the changes in editing, growth in composition, and improvement in my work. I vowed to do a better job in 2013, even wanted to include some video clips.
It is now the first week of December and I am JUST now trying to get organized for ‘a year of chloe 2013’. I really intended to work on this throughout the year, but where did the time go? I really wanted to create a system that would allow me to keep up in a Project 365 fashion while shooting and editing all of these images for my collaborative photography projects. I failed, miserably.
Thankfully I am here to tell all you slackers, if it is indeed more than just me, that you can do a retroactive Project 365! It took a few hours but I managed to choose and edit a daily image from 2013 for 229 days. My system is already organized in folders by day which makes it easy to select a daily image and to see the days I missed. Once you consider I still have to do December I am missing about 100 days. Now I really don’t think I am missing that many days, because I take a pictures everyday even if it is on an iPhone. So I think once I go back through iPhone images with that list of dates, it will be closer to 20 days missed. Not sure I will do that but I could.
I do still plan to comb through my video clips for the final version, but on January 1st I hope to have a fantastic slideshow to share with family and friends. Because my goal was more about documenting Chloe, before I can blog it I will have to swap a few images out for public consumption!
The most important thing to come out of this exercise is I now have a plan for 2014. I might even commit to a real Project 365. Did I just say that out loud?
Blue. Blue is going to be the key to my success. In Lightroom when I dump my cards, even if I am dumping a card with multiple days worth of images, I will select one image each day and label it blue. Then I created a smart collection with all my daily images that are labeled blue.
If I get behind in sharing images, I am okay with that.
If some images are not as great as others, I am okay with that.
This is a project for her and no matter how many images I get or how many days I fail, she will still have these to document her childhood. This is not the only personal project I do, I love shooting a Day in the Life and Stories to Remember as well. So between the two I think I have her childhood pretty well documented.
So, that is my project 365 for slackers.
denver, dallas
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