I’m not generally one for New Year’s Resolutions, but this year I decided to have a go at Project 365. The idea, in short, is to take one photo per day for a year. The claimed benefits of this vary, but boil down to improving one’s photographic technique, creating a “photo diary” for yourself, and documenting your year for the purpose of sharing with others (usually on Flickr).

I was hoping for a mixture of these, but most importantly I intended to keep the creative juices flowing through the year by enforcing a tiny bit of creativity each day. I’m always looking for ways to train my brain to look at the world differently, and spending a bit of time each day framing life through a camera lens seems to be a good way to go about this. I actually bent the rules a little, and let a bit of digital art and even one short video sneak in amongst the photos. After all, the creativity is the point, not the medium.

Anyway, in case you hadn’t guessed by now, I’ve decided to officially abandon the project. I started off well, posting a photo a day until well into April, with a maximum of two or three days backlog. Things started slipping a little in May, and then I caught up again, but I quickly got so far behind that there didn’t seem to be much point carrying on. Today is the 177th day of the year, and my most recently uploaded photo was number 130.

There’s little point dissecting all the reasons, but suffice it to say that it didn’t have the intended effect. Once I started to run out of immediate things to take photos of, and the few generative art ideas I had bubbling away in my brain were turned into pixels and committed to the interwebs, the thought of having to do something creative every day got less and less attractive, and began to feel more like a chore. I decided to have a break to see if that would help, but it actually seemed to make things worse. My photos from my holiday in Cornwall in May let me catch up a bit, but I was still quite behind, and I’ve had no real motivation to take any photos since.

Interestingly, I don’t regret the experience at all. I enjoyed the creative bits while they lasted, and once I began to get fed up of the project, it made me want to get on with other non-visual projects (more on this soon). And I was actually pretty happy with quite a few of the photos that I took.

You can have a look at the 130 photos in the final set, or see below for some of my favourites (click to embiggen).

Photosets: Night One, Night Two

The combined setlist from both nights (not in order of performance):

Belief
Bigger Than My Body
Clarity
Dreaming With A Broken Heart
Good Love Is On The Way
Gravity
I Don’t Need No Doctor (Ray Charles cover)
I Don’t Trust Myself (With Loving You)
I’m Gonna Find Another You
In Repair
No Such Thing
Slow Dancing in a Burning Room
Stop This Train
The Heart Of Life
Vultures
Waiting On The World To Change
Why Georgia
Your Body Is A Wonderland

You can find it at phoblog.org

Taken at the Eden Project, Cornwall on the 2nd January 2007

Taken from Looe, Cornwall on the 19th November 2006