2014 Update

At this time of year the internet becomes saturated with blog posts either reflecting on the year passed or speculating on the road ahead. Many of these blogs will be new, a resolution, and by now most will be facing that tough second article slump. As I type these words, dozens of Day #29’s are being uploaded to Project 365 groups on Flickr. I uploaded a Day #29 once. It looked like this:

Why I quit my 365

I gave up on my own 365. It ended with a whimper. I was uploading photos that were very poor and on the occasion that I did upload anything worth looking at, it would get swamped by the mediocrity that was inherent to my Flickr photostream. On top of that, I was juggling digital and film, which due to the delay in film processing (and my own laziness in never correctly setting the internal clock on my X-E1) meant that organising the project was becoming increasingly muddled. There was no visual consistency to my Flickr, I was uploading B&W film, and then poorly edited B&W digital (and even worse colour digital). One of the photos I took was of a bag of reconstituted potato animal shapes.

I was not self aware of this at the time, it took a new friend to point the above out to me and I am glad he did. What I did know was that I was not taking the sort of photos that I wanted to take. I knew that I wanted to explore project based ideas but was spending far too much time worrying about getting a decent enough photo for my 365. On top of all this I was spending an unholy amount of time obsessing over view counts and favs, wondering why certain photos would do better than others, and spending far too much time looking at Flickr street photography groups with envy.

Project 365 is an interesting concept and I have respect for anyone who commits to one for a whole year, especially those who further restrict themselves with a themed 365. As a project it simply was not for me.

Welcome to 2014

So its a new year. How many of us have spent time in the last few weeks cursing the floorboards, vowing that we will hone or twist our personal trajectories before this stone returns to this spot? On the rare occasions in 2013 where I was able to collect my thoughts I only ever planned on planning.

“I’ve spent far too much time trying to align myself with the world, I don’t think I can be bothered anymore”  E.G.

What I know is that photography will play an important role in the coming year, even if I have been relatively inactive in the past couple of days.

Ive created a portfolio website, just follow the link below. I would love to hear what people think.

http://www.dmcdonald-photography.com

Peace.