P365 – Day 100 amber

If I’ve calculated correctly, today is Day 100 of my Project 365. So I thought I’d use today’s post to explain where things are up to right now.

You might have noticed that over the past couple of weeks, the style of my photos has changed quite a bit. This all came about because I’d started to rethink the whole basis of the project.

When I started my plan was to use my iPhone to take my daily photos. I’d only just got my phone and didn’t know a lot about how it worked, what the camera could and couldn’t do and what editing options were available.

I was downloading the photos to my computer, tweaking them in Photoshop Elements and posting them to my blog. This worked ok on photos that started out being a decent quality, that were taken in good light and that were reasonably sharp.

But while the iPhone camera is pretty good as phone cameras go, I was having a lot of trouble with it in conditions that were less than ideal for photography – which ended up being most of the time. I was taking much better pictures with my normal camera or our point-and-shoot, whichever was on hand at the time.

I was starting to think that if I had better photos, it would make sense to use them instead of the iPhone photos. After all they were generally the ones I was printing out to go in my Project Life album.

It was about this time that I stumbled on some websites that completely changed my thinking and changed the way I published my photos on my blog.

I came across @photojack on Twitter, who tweets a lot of interesting photography links and hints, and he led me to the iPhoneography blog by Glyn Evans (@glyn_e on Twitter). This blog has news and reviews of photography apps for the iPhone and iPad and a discussion forum for iPhoneographers.

This was the first time I’d heard the term ‘iPhoneography’ to describe photography on an iPhone. It’s a really interesting – and fast-growing – field and there are some great photos out there.

I also discovered Dan Howard’s (@OfficialDan) iPhoneography Project 365.  When I saw Dan’s photos I was completely blown away at how great they looked compared to my own pictures, and I realised that there was so much more I could be doing to my photos than simply fiddling with the levels in PS Elements.

A major difference between his photos and mine (other than that he is a professional photographer and I’m a confused amateur) is his use of the wide range of apps available for photography on the iPhone.

So having seen what an excellent Project 365 could look like, I decided to stick with the iPhone to take my daily photos and invest in a few apps to see what I could turn them into.

The one I’m loving best right now is called Camera+  and most of my photos over the last couple of weeks have been modified in one or more ways through that app. It’s both a camera app and an in-phone photo transformer/editor.

Today’s photo is an abstract, just for something a bit different, to mark my 100^th day of doing this project.

Once I started playing around with some of the apps like this, I was tempted to go back over the past three months and re-do all my photos. But I didn’t, because something that Dan Howard said to me stuck in my head, and that is that the 365 project is about the journey, not just the destination. So to go back and change what I did three months ago would mean the photos weren’t an accurate reflection of where I was at that time.

So the photos remain – the good AND the not so good.

(I did go back to a couple of photos that I really didn’t like, just to see how they could have looked, but the original ones will stay on the blog with their post.)

But now that I’ve seen what can be done, I hope my photos will get better and better. While the filters and the other effects might not be to everyone’s taste, I’ve found that they have opened up a whole new world of ways in which to capture and preserve a memory. No matter what effects I use, the most important part of the photo is still the subject, and capturing the subject in a way that best represents the memory is the hardest part of this project.

I feel like this was a major turning point for my project, and I’m now really excited about discovering what else I can learn and finding ways to improve my photography as the year progresses.