Good morning and happy new year to everyone. Today will be broken up into two posts. The first one (this one) will serve to better acquaint you with what you can expect from my blog over the next year (and maybe more if you all enjoy it as much as I do). The later post that will drop this evening will be the first "actual" post for the blog's purpose.
A year ago, my girlfriend at the time convinced me that it would be fun to do a Photo 365 challenge on the Flickr website. So I signed up for a Flickr account and joined (one of the many) 365 groups. Here's a brief explanation of what the Photo 365 Challenge is. Essentially, the goal is that you take photos every single day for one year. You post your best picture to the group and (hopefully) get some feedback from the other members. This meant two things: 1) you were taking pictures every single day for a year. By default your skills as a photographer would improve just from the sheer amount of practice; and 2) you were able to receive feedback which, coupled with the practice, makes your improvements that much more significant.
After less than a month, however, I found it was increasingly difficult to keep up with. Between school and other commitments, I just didn't have time to get out and take pictures. So when this year past year began to close, I debated trying it again. But rather than doing it on Flickr, I decided I'd rather do it on a blog. Which brings us here.
There are several reasons I'm choosing to do it on here rather than on Flickr (or another photo sharing website). The biggest of which is that I can get into a little more detail about what I did or didn't do with a specific photograph. With Flickr, you just post and that's that. There's no chance to share or explain anything really. And I want the chance to share, but not because I think I'm King Kodachrome with all things photography. You see, the real goal of my blog is to show how much fun you can have with photography even with a limited skill set. If other beginners stop by and see what I'm up to, I hope that they will feel better about what they're doing in photo-lives. I don't expect to create beautiful images every day. A lot of what I'll be sharing will probably be pretty crappy. But it's the best way for me to improve. And if I can make other people feel better about what they're doing by embarrassing myself a bit, then so be it. It wouldn't be the first time.
I plan on trying all kinds of techniques that are out there. From simple to complex, I'll fumble through them all. And I also plan on trying all kinds of styles: from portrait to landscape to still life. If there's anything you'd like to see me try either leave a comment on one of the posts or send an email to 136songs@gmail.com. I'll do my best to get to them all. I figure the best way to figure out my strengths is to try as many different things as possible.
So today the adventure begins. It's raining pretty heavily here, so the biggest challenge today is going to be figuring out where/what to shoot. I was planning on hitting up a park, but that doesn't seem like it will happen. I look forward to this year and I hope that you will all stick with me. As I said in the last post, at least you can all enjoy the ride of watching me go insane trying to accomplish this. Okay, I guess that's it for now. Please stop back this evening for the first official 365 post. Until then, happy snapping!
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