new photo a day blog for 2009

December 15, 2008 · by Jim Talkington · in ,

For quite a while I’ve been planning on shooting more personal work. No specific plans, I’ve just felt that I need to get out and shoot with a camera more, just for fun. That’s why we all got started in photography, isn’t it? The joy of taking photographs. Now, with the internet, there’s also the joy of sharing our passion through posting images and sharing online discussion.

Let me go ahead and give the punch line to today’s post: I’m starting a new photo a day blog in 2009. The goal isn’t necessarily to shoot every single day but to post a new photo every day. I won’t kick in with regular postings until the first of the year so you’re all getting a sneak preview while it’s under construction (the first sample photos you’ll see were all shot this morning with my Panasonic point and shoot). Looking back, I see a trail of discussions we’ve had here at prophotolife that have led me to “a photo a day, 2009″. I hope you don’t mind a little flashback while I link to the posts that brought me around to this new goal.

I’ve discovered a couple of things about learning over the past year (hey, that‘s learning about learning). One of the ways to learn is to have a specific goal in mind and to go for it. That’s very methodical and I’m all for it. The other way to learn is to watch your footsteps going one after the other, day after day, until you eventually look up and find yourself at a new destination. That’s how I came to planning a photo a day once again for 2009. Looking back over a year of prophotolife posts shows the footsteps taken along the way.

Back in July was the post “how a photo a day blog helped me achieve personal photography goals”. This is something I did a couple of years ago and it worked out well. I’ll leave you to read the article if you‘re interested in the specifics of my first go ’round.

Then, after many months of discussion about post-processing here on the website, I took time to download the the free trial of Lightroom 2 from Adobe . To put it simply, I got hooked and bought a license after playing with it for a couple of weeks. Many readers extolled the virtues of the program (along with
Apple Aperture 2) and I agree with their endorsements. We‘re not using it at the studio because of a different workflow for multiple users…but for my own personal work, Lightroom is now the number one post-production tool. It has me more excited about shooting, to be honest, because of all the capabilities. It lets me do simple image tweaks faster and more simply than anything else I’ve used.

Just a couple weeks ago I pulled out my little Panasonic DMC-TZ3 point and shoot to play around with different photo aspect ratios. Wanting to find a new perspective for personal work, the 4:3 format really appealed. So did the little Panasonic! Unfortunately, the little camera doesn’t shoot in RAW and I’m a big believer in the RAW format. But working the camera’s jpegs in Lightroom gave an easy, non-destructive way to edit the JPEGs that made the whole thing feel “not so bad”. I still want to get a RAW capable point and shoot sometime (trying to decide between the Canon PowerShot G10 and Panasonic DMC-LX3K) since I’ll be carrying a camera around more in ‘09.

Then, not long ago, readers shared a whole lot of comments and ideas about online photo gallery options. When I started to dive into the possibilities for online galleries I stumbled across Pixelpost, an open source photoblog application. Hmmmm, a photoblog…

That’s about the time I realized I was nearing a destination. The last pieces of the puzzle? Prophotolife is hosted through GoDaddy and there’s plenty of server space for multiple sites with the different GoDaddy.com Hosting Plans. I’ve also had the url “Talkington Photo Video” for some time and never did anything with it. So, it was time to put the pieces all together.

Not every photo will be great, of that I’m sure…and that’s not the point. Discovering new ways of seeing and working through the process of a photo a day is the important part. I’ll let you know in a year or so how it all worked out!

Tags: ,