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Deciding to take a photo every single day for an entire year seems like a great way to indulge yourself in some quality time with your favourite camera(s), it also seems like a great way to develop your skills as a photographer, and it also seems like a great way to embark on a photographic project to be proud of. It is all of these things, but they don’t call it a challenge for nothing!

Here’s the most important things I’ve learned so far…

It’s all about making much of little

For most of us daily life will get in the way of indulging in the things we enjoy most. For me, right along with a few other pleasures in life, creating a decent image on a daily basis for this Project 365 is something I most definitely enjoy, so some things will get in the way of it. Day jobs, lack of winter light, crappy weather, apparently limited subjects and man flu – to name a few.

With these constraints in place (rarely all at once, thank feck!), and if, like me, you’ve undertaken a Project 365 challenge, it often seems highly unlikely that you’re going to finish the day with a photographic masterpiece. However, almost every time I go for a walk around my hometown with the camera, I find something to take a photo of. It may not be overwhelming and it may not be remotely interesting to some people, but I have challenged myself and have managed a photo that, nine times out of ten, is better than just a simple “snap”.

The secret here, I think, is to forget about the “big picture” and look for the details within a potentially bigger picture. The subject for that epic masterpiece isn’t always available, and it’s most definitely not coming out to play on a dark night, in the pouring rain! Peering into details often becomes a necessity under these circumstances, even the most obvious and shot-to-pieces subjects have details and/or angles not yet explored by the masses and their cameras – and I’ve been looking for them.

The detail I’m looking for is in my town, the small pieces of the place that people may walk past every day but don’t always notice, such as:

• Minor architectural features.

• Alternate points of view of existing photographic magnets.

• The different ways things look in crap weather, because people rarely stop to look at rain pouring down over a street lamp, do they?

The problem with photographing details is that not all details are immediately aesthetic, so a bit of walking around the potential subject is often required to get the best composition possible. It probably makes me look a bit stupid if there are people around, but so what? Taking a picture of a doorway or a street lamp probably seems pretty stupid to anyone not into photography anyway :)

Good composition is what makes a photo something more than a “snap”. Composition is the bit of you that goes into your photo, it’s the most essential creative part of photography that allows you to show things how you wish them to be seen, and it’s also pretty much the only part you’re in complete control of. After you hit that shutter release button it’s mostly all science and software – the image is pretty much set in digital stone, that is, unless you really enjoy Photoshopping.

To wrap this up I’ll let Elliott Erwitt sum up what I’ve learned:

“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”