I recently read a photography article that suggested taking a picture a day for 365 days. I have heard of this before but generally dismissed it as I figured that I’d probably end up with about 310 mediocre photos. But the argument of this article was taking pictures every day would help train your brain to be regularly focusing on photographic composition. Also the act of having your hands on your camera every day will give you familiarity with it such that you eventually use it without really thinking about manipulating the settings. So, I decided that there was some value and wisdom in this and decided to give it a try. And after all ‘film’ is virtually free these days so there is little cost to me other than time. So here is my first week of photos.
Day 1. I carried my camera around during my afternoon walk through the park. There were some yellow flowers in a soccer field and I got down and shot some close-ups and tried to get some other flowers blurred in the background.
Day 2. A prickly pear cactus with a Hindu temple in the background. This temple is near the park where I walk and I thought it seemed an ironic photo. I see the shiny spires of this place through the trees as I walk and had been thinking of ways to make that work in a photo. It was taken just before sunset
Day 3. A panorama of the Great Sand Dunes that I posted on my last blog. I drove most of this day and didn’t have a lot of time to take other photos so this my photo of the day.
Day 4. A photo I shot from up on the sand dunes. It was midday and there weren’t many shadows to work with on the dunes, but I tried to work on some lines across the dunes toward the mountains. I also had to shoot around the hundreds of people that were around me.
Day 5. A parting shot of the Sand Dunes against the mountains. I picked this area of the dunes because of all of the curves and shadows. I would have like to have gotten closer, but that was not as easy as it seems.
Day 6. This shot was taken at Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone. I was really drawn to the colors here and got down low so I could have mountains in the distance as well. This area is covered with vents that are constantly steaming and it a very interesting place to see if you don’t mind the smell.
Day 7. A cloudy mountain with undulating hills in the foreground. I was attracted to the clouds moving around this peak. I really had a lot of trouble in editing making this work. This was shot early in the morning, the hills were very green, and the trees on the slope had just received some snow. This creates kind of an odd color shift in the scene as you get to the point where the trees are dusted with snow.
So there you have seven OK photos. This initial seven days was made easier by traveling to beautiful places, but the real challenge will be when I am just around the house. My thought so far is that I like having to grab my camera and shoot a photo every day as it keeps me thinking about what to shoot and how to shoot it. I will try to keep up with my picture-a-day plan, but I won’t bore you with all of my mediocre photos every week. Thanks for reading.
Jason Frels 
I have never been to either of these two national parks, and enjoyed your photos. The juxtaposition of the sand dunes with the mountains is a beautiful one.
I subscribed to a photo journal app for a few years, and it was nice to see a monthly video montage of photos. I recently let the subscription expire because it is pretty expensive.
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Thanks, this was my first trip to Great Sand Dunes and I had always wanted to check it out. We were on the way to Yellowstone as my daughter will be working there starting yesterday.
I usually post my photos that I like the most to Flickr and I guess that is my montage over time. I do try not to be selective in what I post there. My other Great Sand Dunes panorama is doing quite well on Flickr.
Thanks
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I didn’t think to look for you on Flickr; I’ll take a look there.
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Thanks. That is my preferred photo sharing site because they let you post at whatever resolution and crop you want to share. And there are a lot of people on Flickr but almost none of the nonsense comments and arguing that you find on other social media. Mainly just photography.
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I’ve used Flickr for years, but just for storage/backup. I also have an Adobe account for storage. Still trying to figure out which is better so I can consolidate into one place.
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For storage, I have a OneDrive account that is synched to my hard drive. When I put my photos there, it automatically uploads to my cloud folder. I do have to pay a small amount for a subscription for a few hundred GigaBytes, but it is safe and I can get to it from anywhere even if my computer evaporates.
The free tier of Flickr lets you put up to 1000 photos, but I mainly use that site to interact with other photographers rather than storage. And it is easy to send someone a link to your photo on Flickr. You can pay for Flickr Pro and get more storage.
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I do use Flickr Pro—thanks for the tip on OneDrive—I’ll look at that.
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I once had the unfortunate experience of losing about 2,000 photos when my external hard drive became corrupted. About 500 were from a trip to New Zealand. After that, I started using Flickr.
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That sounds horrible. I do have a portable hard drive too, but I try not to depend on it too much.
We use OneDrive where I work. A couple of years ago the hard drive failed on my laptop. I put in a new one, synched with OneDrive and had everything back to normal in a short time.
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They all seem fitting for glossy photos in some fancy magazine. But my favorite was the photo on top of the sand dune (Day 4). I hope you don’t get a permanent strap mark around your neck, from lugging your camera around every day.
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Thanks.
I was really looking forward to climbing the sand dunes and shooting photos. But I have a story to tell about that sand dune adventure featuring a doofus with a camera strapped around his neck. I will have to write that this weekend.
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That’s a story I’m looking forward to. I relate to all doofuses.
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Every once in a while I do something mind-bogglingly stupid. It is quite amazing to think about it afterwards and wonder what I was thinking.
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I’ve found that as I get older, this happens less and less often. Usually because I forget about the stupid things I’ve done.
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Or maybe you have just lowered the bar for what qualifies as a dumb thing. Or is it raised the bar? Dumb behavior does seem to occur in bars.
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That’s why I avoid bars. Except for “a man walks into a bar” jokes.
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I actually missed my picture of the day yesterday because I am trying to recover from a foot injury. Oh well, that didn’t last long.
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Ouch! I hope you’re going to be okay. You could have posted a picture of your foot.
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That might get me kicked off of WordPress.
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Uh-Oh, did you hurt it worse?
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I like to think that my foot is getting better
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I look forward to the story.
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It has no cowbell in it
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Too bad! Maybe a cowbell would have saved you.
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A “doofus”, what another great D name for certain stooges. It fits so well with Doolally , Dunderhead and Dummkopf. 😂
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I think this is a great idea! You get more practice and we get more photos. A win-win. 🙂 The sand dunes look like I could reach out and touch the sand, especially the Day 4 photo. The prickly pear photo is a really good close up as well. Those spikes, I really don’t want to reach out and touch!
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