On January 1 I started another 365 project. I’m going to be upfront and say that this if my 4th attempt and I failed every previous attempt. I think the farthest I ever made it was 156 days. That’s not even half way so why on earth would I try this again, having failed so many times in the past? Even now, less than two weeks in to this new project, I’ve been struggling. I don’t want to take a photo. I don’t feel creative. I just can’t be bothered when I have no decent editing programs. For three days I’ve felt like I’ve had to force myself to take a photo because I refused to fail in the first two weeks, photos that really aren’t that great.

For those who aren’t familiar with a 365 project, the goal is to take at least one photo every day for an entire year. Many choose to start on January 1. Many choose to start whenever the notion strikes: their birthday, a holiday, the day they find someone’s inspiring completed project. Or any other day out of the 365 in a year. Rules on when you upload the photo are a little more flexible because some days you just don’t have internet. Or maybe you don’t want to upload the photo at all; most of the people I have heard of doing this do, however, create a blog or a Flickr account and set to uploading nearly daily. Some people have themes, one of the more common being a self portrait every day for a year. I’ve actually tried one of those, though the photos weren’t really shared. Some people want to learn how to use their camera, others just want to document a year in their life.

So in my days of doubt and asking “Self, why are you putting yourself through this torture AGAIN??” I have been trying to determine why, exactly, am I doing this.

I talk about photography a lot. Well, most of it is online talk but still. I try to make posts here with different photos but I’ve been slacking. A lot. I think about photography a lot. I spend a lot of time looking at photographs. I spend a lot of time thinking “I want my photographs to be better.” Then I sit back and do nothing. I leave my camera in the bag and tell myself that for some inconsequential reason or other, I can’t take pictures that day. I want that new lens I’ve been drooling over. I need Photoshop or Lightroom. I need to live in a different town because this one is so blasted dull. It’s easy to find excuses when you’re looking for one. I end up sitting on my lazy bum doing nothing except holding that internal dialogue with myself, whining about why my photography isn’t getting any better. Why my 365s are sucking.

And I realized what I’m currently lacking: effort. Again, when one is looking for excuses there are many to be found; in a heartbeat I could give five different reasons as to why I haven’t been able to put more of an effort in to taking pictures, processing them, and getting them online but they wouldn’t be reasons so much as empty excuses. (OK, the headache that made me fairly ill when I moved might be a valid excuse; the others not so much.) I do want to do this project to improve my photos. From my other attempts at daily photo projects have come some of my favorite photos. I wouldn’t have taken those photos if I hadn’t been pushing myself to do something. While I am not expecting to get a masterpiece from every day I am going to try to make the commitment to not take a photo just to have a photo.

I could go on more about why this is so important to me but I think I need to leave that for another day. I’m feeling rather rusty with the whole blogging thing, which can also only be remedied with practice. And whipping up layouts. Baby steps, yes? For now, have a look at my 365 so far (today’s photo opened this post):

Oh hey this flickr slide show thing is pretty nifty. I’ll have to use it more often, which means I’ll need to be more organized with my sets and such. It also probably means that the slide show will update as I add more photos to the set so after today it will have more than 13 photos in it, even though this was posted on day 13 of the project.

I had planned to do some maintenance to the site over the weekend, WordPress upgrades and whatnot. Since everything was in transition I was unable to do so. The time off actually gave me some more time to think. I’ve been putting a bit of time into my 365 project. It’s making the idea of a photoblog a bit… superfluous. It’s also causing my flickr account to fill up, which is another problem. I haven’t decided what to do yet but I might end up nixing the photo blog. I’m terrible at coming to decisions, though, so who knows.

One of the things I did do instead of updating sites (that couldn’t be updated) was create a mosaic for my pictures from February. I am pleased to say that I got 27 of the 28 days of February. I think it’ll be something to look back on all of these at the end of the year.

By the way, it is confusing to come back to adding WordPress tags after dealing with flickr for a few weeks. There, you separate tags with a space and use quotes if you want a two-or-more word tag. WordPress, of course, makes you separate them with commas.

Wait. There are no categories for either 365 or echodrift proper. Apparently I’m having some database issues so please excuse every thing that’s broken until I can get it taken care of. I’m in the process of backing everything up and contacting my hosting company. We’ll see how it goes.

Edit: my webhost has corrected some issue with my databases and all appears to be in working order now. What the issue was I have no idea. They never inform me of anything, just reply with a message that says “The issue has been corrected.” How helpful is that? I’m thinking none. Anyway, I really need to stop freaking out about stuff so late at night. I’m sure it’s not good for my health.

I have a couple other projects in mind as well but they’re still in the planning stages. But that’s the fun part, you see: always having something to work on.