Reflections on my first year of Project 365
Let me say up front I have LOVED taking more photos. I use the Timehop app on my phone to revisit old photos and social media statuses, and I always seek out the photos first – a picture says so much more than a Twitter update, generally. I am very excited that as I go through 2015 I will be rediscovering all the pictures I took last year. So as far as I am concerned the whole project has been a massive win. But there were some things that didn’t work out the way I expected at the start:
The best camera is the one you have with you
I started this challenge partly because I wanted to try to take better photos. I claimed the geekdaddy’s Fuji X100 as my own when he got a new camera last Christmas. And whilst the Fuji does take BEAUTIFUL pictures, and whilst I have mostly got the hang of using it now, it’s still not my main camera. My main camera is still my trusty iPhone which lives in my pocket, and is always the first camera that comes to hand when I see a photo opportunity. If I’ve had time to plan a shoot (mostly for review items) I’ll use the Fuji. But for family snaps, it’s the iPhone. I use the camera in my phone so much that I said to the geekdaddy, in all seriousness, that maybe my next phone should be a Nokia Lumia, given how good the cameras are on those. And for this iPhone girl to switch to a Windows Phone would be a BIG step! But the camera is the most-used feature of my phone, maybe I should be looking for a better one.
A simple workflow is king
Blipfoto is great for a daily photo project. But then I complicated the whole thing by wanting to share a roundup of my photos here on the blog each week as well. This meant a lot of rework as I couldn’t find a way to embed the Blipfoto pictures directly, and so had to re-upload them all here and then copy my titles and commentary over as well. As the year passed I got quicker and quicker at doing this, but I also started wondering if there was a better way. And then a week or so ago Blipfoto completely redesigned their site and made it harder to copy and paste my posts across. The whole workflow got more complicated again.
Beware of unexpected side effects
One thing I never expected when I started taking more photos was that I would use Instagram less. But that’s what happened. Because I didn’t choose my daily photo until the end of each day at the earliest (and sometimes I’d pick a whole week’s worth at once), I held off posting anything to Instagram as I didn’t want to “double share” my chosen picture and spam my followers. Once I’d chosen my daily photo it felt to late to go back and share any of the other pictures, as the moment was lost. And that then led to another negative side-effect. I use 23snaps to share family photos with a small number of family members who are not on Facebook. And the way I get my pictures over to 23snaps is by posting them to Instagram with a hashtag. No photos on Instagram = no photos shared with the family.
So what does 2015 look like?
I’m committed to completing Project 365 again this year. But the first thing I’m going to change is the way I post my photos. I’m dropping Blipfoto – it added a level of complexity to the whole process that I think I’ll be better without. I’ll be going back to Instagram, which will bring me back to sharing more photos with my family and friends. I can also then directly embed the Instagram pictures into my roundup post here on the blog, rather than having to re-process all the images, so that should make my workflow easier. My aim will be to share at least one photo on Instagram per day, however if I miss the odd day I’m not going to stress about it – for me the main goal is still to encourage me to take more photos.
If you want to see what we get up to in 2015 you can follow me on Instagram, or catch up with my weekly roundups here on the blog. Here’s to catching loads more moments like this:
The post Reflections on my first year of Project 365 appeared first on geekmummy.
