Starting New Projects
EricMesa
- 3 minutes read - 480 words
Day Fourteen: “You Told Me You Were Clean” by DJOtaku, on Flickr
It’s been 16 days now since I started taking part in flickr’s famous 365 Project. Well, flickr has many of them, but the most famous one most people partake in is the one where the photographer takes 1 self-portrait per day for 365 days. The reason for the popularity in the self-portrait 365 project is probably due to two properties of said project. First of all, by forcing the photographer to take self-portraits you remove the photographer’s block that can come from thinking of a subject every day. Since you know it’s always going to be you, you don’t need to worry about what to photograph. On the other hand, self-portraits contain a challenge in that you have to pre-frame your shot and then get in it. At the moment the shutter clicks you are no looking through the viewfinder. I’ve found it to be a great exercise in creativity because it wouldn’t be fun for myself or my viewers if they were all just shots of me sitting or standing in front of a wall. I’ve only begun to scratch away at the limits of my creativity, but the house has gotten in the way; more on that shortly. I think my most creative shot thus far was on Day 14 and has to do with Swine Flu. Depending upon whether you are reading this shortly after posting or years later - the Swine Flu [near] Pandemic of 2009 was one of the biggest stories of the second quarter in 2009. It’s been on the news almost nonstop for the past week and so I had to try and do a topical 365 shot. I’m pretty happy with the result. Follow my progress in the 365 project by visitng my 365 se t.
My father-in-law applying primer by DJOtaku, on Flickr
The biggest dampener on my photograpic creativity has been a lack of time and that lack of time has come from the fact that we’re finally moving into the house. We spent all day from Friday to Sunday painting the house. (And we’ll be doing a tad bit more Monday) We is Danielle, my in-laws and I. We are extremely bushed. Danielle, her dad, and I had never painted at all. Her mother had never painting on that scale. So we were very worried at the end of day 1. But by the end of Sunday we had accomplished everything we wanted to - paint about 90% of the house. It’s not that the previous owners had the house painted weird colours or anything like that. It’s just that, for example, one of the rooms was pink and we don’t have a daughter (or any kids, yet). So we got the house painted and overcame all the obstacles of our ignorance in the world of painting.