Andy Gapin

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.

Anyone who stops by here regularly has clearly seen that, over the course of this year, my updates have slowed to a complete crawl. Some of that can be blamed on planning a wedding, some can be blamed on being much more focused on running. Truthfully,  it’s mostly been a lack of motivation to take the time to find things to post about when posts weren’t finding me on their own. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been just this site that has suffered for those reasons. My time with my camera has diminished just as much and for the same reasons.

For most of us, it’s normal to shift focus to different interests and sometimes some interests take a backseat to others. For the majority of this year, running and wedding-related things have been the main focus, but with the wedding a few months past now, I want to get back to my camera.

In the past, I’ve taken photos when I’ve had things to take photos of. I want to change that and start taking photos because I want to take photos (which I do want to do). There are millions of things around to make photos out of and thinking that there is nothing shouldn’t be an excuse to not take photos.

I should have subjects because I want to take photos, I shouldn’t take photos because I have subjects.

So I’ve decided that to force myself to start looking for things to take photos of instead of waiting for them to come to me, I’m going to do a photo 365 project for 2012. I’m going to produce at least one presentable photo everyday. I’ve already got a few ideas for weekly themes, but I’m not going to limit myself or force myself to always have a theme. The photos can be of anything that strikes my interest.

This project is going to be mainly about two things. The first is developing my skills so that I can produce photos worth sharing on any given day and without having to take dozens or even hundreds of shots to get that photo. I want to teach myself to take the time to set up shots and think about what I’m trying to capture instead of just firing away. I’m looking to spend less time taking snapshots and more time making photos. The second thing I’m going for is learning to see the world around me from the eyes of a photographer. I want to get better at looking around and seeing the beautiful things that are worth photographing. I want to take notice more.

In reality, I’ll probably end up with a lot of photos of my cats and various things around my home or my desk at work. A large portion of the photos will probably be from my iPhone instead of my DSLR as well, but considering how great the iPhone 4S camera is, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

My plan, at least as I see it now, is to post my photos daily on Twitter, Flickr, Google+, and maybe Facebook or Tumblr. At least as much as I can. Then, I’ll do a weekly post here with my photos from previous week. I may also join 500px and post to Instagram as well to round it all out. We’ll see. I’m hoping that I can make pretty good use of If This Then That so I can just upload once and have the photo automatically posted everyone. Additionally, I’m planning to finally build out the photography site that I wanted to do a year ago, but that won’t be right away. I’ve been paying for the domain for over a year now, but I never got around to actually building the thing. Part of the problem was a lack of having content to start out with, but I think I’ve got enough photos of bands and such to get started.

Anyway, look for that coming on 2012. I’m hoping I actually stick with it.