PJNet

When I first met Stephanie Roberts at a party hosted by James Harris of Elemental Interactive, she was carrying a camera. She will be at our SoCon08 conference and at the conference’s social networking site, I learned she is involved in Project 365, where people commit to shooting and, eventually, posting one photo every day. Many post their work at Flickr and the stuff is fascinating to look at. Some,  like Stephanie , post some commentary and their photos at their own sites. Several say it improves their photography.

It’s not that easy, the project tutorial says:

This is perhaps the most important tip of all. You will get tired of taking a photo every single day. Some days, you will consider giving up. Don’t. The end result is worth the effort. Remind yourself why you wanted to do it in first place.

There will be times you’ll think there’s nothing interesting left to take a photo of, and times you’ll think you didn’t do anything exciting enough to take a photo of. There’s always a great photo to be made.

Get out of the house and take a walk. Or stay inside and look around. Take a photo of something important to you. Take a photo of the inside of your house so you can see how your taste has changed over the years. Take a photo of anything, just don’t stop.

Of course, this post would have made more sense if I had done it prior to the New Year. However, I just posted a question : “Is it too late?”  at the Project 365 discussion group — this year Project 365+1- Jan 1st 2008 for the leap year –and they say although most folks started on January 1, if you want to start now, go for it.

Personally, I am not sure if I want to make the commitment, I already have a very full plate; still the idea intrigues me.  And I think having students in media classes, even beyond photojournalism classes, shoot a photo each day might be a good idea. I teach a feature writing class and it might help the students become more aware of the world around them — and it might do the same for me.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Crowdsourcing, Flickr, Photojournalism, Project 365, Social Media, Social Networking, digital media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.