my name is mwd

The year 2010 was a good year for a lot of things, but from the point of view of my photography it was a rather poor one. Mostly, due to work I suspect, I found very little time to take pictures. This year I’ve undertaken to post a picture a day to flickr in an attempt to help make me pick up the camera more and (hopefully) become a better photographer. I’m now fifty odd days in, and I thought I’d share some observations.

Until now, I mostly relied on serendipity to get good photos, I just happened to be in the right place at the right time and have my camera to hand. Doing a picture a day breaks that – I now need to proactively seek out things to make a good picture, and that’s hard work. It means a lot of frantic searching for things, and occasionally putting out a photo I’m not happy with as it just didn’t come together that day. I suspect this is compounded slightly by the fact I work from home currently – i.e., I don’t get out much during the week. As a result I’ve been doing a lot more set based photography than I’ve ever done before. What do I have around the house that’s interesting/unusual that I can use as a subject? Hopefully as the weather improves and daylight hours extend into the evening more I can swing the balance again, but for now there is often a day where come 8pm I’ve not got a picture yet and I tear through the house looking for the object for today’s picture.

As an aside, if I fail to make my current business venture fly, my next one will be a subscription based mail service for people on 365s where I’ll post a random bit of tat to you every day to act as inspiration for that day’s photo. I’d certainly find this hugely useful, as I’m running out of random items in the house to photo and there’s still three hundred odd days to go. As Dom (one of my inspirations for starting the 365) pointed out, I could perhaps automate this and just rake in the profits. No stealing that idea now.

Anyway, back to the point :) I originally wrote in the opening paragraph that the plan was to “take a photo a day” but quickly fixed that to “post a photo a day”. Oh yes, I fear this project falls foul of my perfectionist side at times. In January I posted 33 pictures (31 days, plus 2 adjusted versions based on feedback, on which more below). A quick look in my photo library shows I have 1166 photos for January, and that doesn’t include the ones I culled due to being too blurred or otherwise beyond redemption. When you (or at least when I) look at other people producing photos day in, day out for their 365 on Flickr it all looks so effortless. Somewhere in my head I knew that there was more to it than that, but it’s easy to ignore that when you’re presented with amazing results.

That said, this all helps with the aim of improving my photography skills. Whilst I’m slowly getting better at working the camera (making sure I set it up properly before starting, getting better at knowing what the output will be like for a given set of settings), my post-flow of going through a day’s photos in Aperture, whittling it down to a few that are good enough, then tweaking those photos until I’m happy, has really sped up. I’ve got to know Aperture a lot better, and how to use it a lot better. Aperture is particularly vexing when you start using it as it doesn’t force you into any form of workflow, you need to find your own. I’d come up with one that I’d been happy with for years, but in the last month it’s changed a lot. Now my intention is to get through the post-production phase as quickly as possible, and my new flow lets me do that.

In fact, when Aperture 3.0 came out I was rather unhappy with it. It seemed to be slow and cumbersome compared to 2.x, and I was quite tempted to downgrade again. But between subsequent point updates and being forced to use it in (a mild form of) anger, I’ve found a new respect for it. There’s some things I’d love to change, but there is with any product. But on the whole it lets me get on with working with my photos without getting in my way, particularly when working in full screen mode, as I now typically do.

I’ve also used other tools on occasion to process my pictures – mostly the wonderful Pixelmator, and on rare occasion Adobe Photoshop. In fact, to some degree it makes me wish I had yet more time to learn how to use tools like Pixelmator and Photoshop properly, I barely scratch the surface on what are complex and powerful products. But I have to remind myself you can’t do everything at once – that’s perhaps another 365 somewhere in the years to come :)

The final thing I want to touch on is feedback. I’m hugely grateful for the comments I’ve been fortunate to receive on my photos, and in particularly the critical comments from friends suggesting how to improve on what I’ve posted. Given the aim of the 365 is to help me improve, this feedback has been invaluable – suggesting a different crop, or different colour balance, etc. Each time I get this I go back to Aperture and try apply the suggestions, and the result is typically a better photo than the one I had before. It’s hard to overstate how grateful I am for people taking time to give such feedback.

That’s it for now. I’m told the tough points in this come at 30 days (woo, passed!) and 100 days (eek), so we’ll see how it goes over the year, but I thought this would help tell you how it’s been going so far for those of you who had enquired. The summary is that it’s not as easy as it looks, but it’s definitely paying off so far in terms of improving my photography.