Andy Gapin

Another week down already. Not every day was easy last week, but the days that weren’t still produced photos that I was really happy with.

Friday turned out to be the first Instagram photo I’ve chosen for my daily photo. I actually had another photo selected, but when I took a look at some of the other photos I had from the day on my computer, I liked this one a lot. My wife and I had a date night at Jose Tejas and I Instagrammed a bunch of shots from dinner. This particular one just came out really nice and the filter actually enhanced the photo a lot from the very dimly lit shot that it originally was.

I can’t believe I’m already eight weeks into this project. Unfortunately, I feel like in the last couple of weeks I’ve sort of lost focus a little. One of my goals is to learn to see things naturally, but in the last couple of weeks I have’t been doing that at all. Instead, I’ve been forcing myself to find things later in the night before going to bed. On one hand, I’ve ended up with some photos of things I would have never otherwise looked twice at, but on the other hand, it feels a bit forced.

On two separate occasions this week, my project almost came to an end. Last night, I actually hopped back out of bed when I realized I had completely forgotten to take a photo. And on Thursday, I had planned on taking my photo for the day at the Jealous Sound show in Philly, but I ended up having a really difficult time getting a good spot with a good angle. The venue was very narrow and I couldn’t really get off to the side at all. I had the microphone directly between myself and Blair the entire time and wasn’t close enough to get a shot of anyone else in the bad. Technically, the shot I finally got came after midnight, but I don’t think that really matters much.

This past week has officially marked the point in which marathon training and my photo 365 project start to be at odds with each other. There are only so many hours in the day and after a long day of work and an six to ten mile run, still finding time to think about photography is hard. On days where I’ve already got a photo from earlier in the day, it’s a little easier, but I still have to find time to import it into Lightroom and make any adjustments necessary before posting it. On days where I don’t have a photo from earlier in the day, I’m left with little time before bed to make all the magic happen. Unfortunately, this will only continue to get worse as my mileage increases over the next few months, but at the same time, at least I’m keeping busy and doing things.

I’m also starting to realize more and more that this project is becoming an exploration of my everyday life. My photos come more from the things around me than they do from my attempts to branch out into the world in the name of photography. For the most part, I think this is a good thing. This is more in line with my goal, which is to be able to see the world around me more photographically. Though, that being said, I do want to also explore more beyond what is naturally around me and find new things that I would haven’t experienced otherwise.

This week in my photo 365 project taught me that even when you really try to think a shot through, sometimes, it just doesn’t go according to plan and there are things you can’t control, like your cats being all up in your face. However, I also learned that sometimes things do go your way and you walk away with a shot that looks exactly like what you had in your head.

This week was pretty fun for my project. I feel like I learned a bit about myself and was surprised a lot. I ended up with multiple picks this week that I didn’t expect to turn out to be my best photo from the day. I tried some new stuff and it worked out and I ended up with a couple photos unlike any others I’ve ever taken. Though, that’s not to say that every day was easy. I struggled to produce a photo at all for day 25 and I feel like day 27′s photo could have been composed and shot better.

For the third January in a row, my wife and I paid a visit to Mickey and friends down at Walt Disney World. This year, we went down specifically to run the Goofy Challenge, but I already wrote about that. While our trip was shorter than in past years, I still managed to take a lot of photos. With this being our third trip, I already had a ton of photos of the parks so I knew I could skip a lot and just focus on things I either haven’t photographed or that I knew I could photograph differently.

Week three had some ups and downs for me. On some days, I had a few great photos to choose from, but there were a couple days where I struggled to find a good photo. This week, I also put my phone to good use, four of the seven photos were taken with it.

The first part of week two was spent in Disney World. I thought that would make getting tons of great photos easy, but we took a short trip and felt very rushed to do everything we wanted to do. Sadly, that didn’t leave a lot of time to set up and compose many photos. I came home with a lot of snapshots, but not a lot of actual photos. I also found myself scrambling at night to dump my photos to our iPad so I could go through them and pick a photo. I have a few photo editing apps that are decent, even for RAW files, but sometimes it’s still a little hard to get the photo just right on there. Still, despite all that, when I did have a minute or two to stop and take photos, I found myself trying to do different things than I would normally.

The last photo is of my sister-in-law who hates when I take photos of her. Naturally, this means I try to take as many as possible. This one was at a big family dinner at my wife’s parents’ house. They were sitting on stools next to each other and she put her head on my wife’s shoulder for moment. I happened to have my camera in my hand already and snapped the shot real quickly.

Week one of my photo 365 project is done already! So far, it’s been pretty fun. I can easily say that I’ve taken a lot more photos now because of it. I spend more time consciously thinking about it and looking for things to photograph. One of my goals from this project is that this process will become a bit more subconscious. I’d like to be able to just naturally take notice of things more. It’s too early for that to start to happen yet, but consciously thinking about this instead of not thinking about it at all is definitely a good start.

Already, I can see that some days will be easy and others are going to be a struggle. At least with the struggle days, I’m motivated to get my camera out and try new things. The photos of the rubber duckies and the magazines would have never happened without this project. Some days, I find that I try a bunch of things to get something cool and when I look at the photos on the computer, I have a bunch of photos I really like, in addition to the one photo I pick for the day.

The second half of this first week included a trip to Disney World so that helped make things a bit easier, but because we were making it a short trip, I didn’t have the luxury of spending a lot of time thinking about photos and setting them up. Most of them had to be snapped quickly while running from ride to ride.