Last year I did the 365 Challenge. For those who aren’t familiar with this, the 365 is basically taking a picture each day during a year.

In December 2009 I started to think about doing something challenging for 2010. Photography is my passion and I love what I o. I like to learn new things every day, so I needed a project to help me stay motivated to create new work. I decided to do the 365 for fun and to explore more about what photography is all about. I thought, “Maybe I’ll find a new thing or I’ll discover what I don’t like to take pictures of, who knows… let’s just explore”

One of the first time I read about someone doing the 365 challenge was Arielle Nadel, a teenager girl that did the project with Danbo a cute little guy that I loved. I eventually got one myself and named him KoKo! but that’s another story. That really inspired me.

The good side of the 365 challenge is that at the end you’re going to be able to see all the photos and remember what you did during the year. My memory is more visual, for me it’s very difficult to remember names of people, names of places, phone numbers, birthdays, and I can’t recall what I did two days ago without thinking very hard or looking at my calendar. So I like the a idea of seeing a year of my life passing by on my screen saver.

Yosemite Park, California

There are different ways to do this project and I decided to go for it on January 1st, 2010. But I didn’t know exactly what to do, It wasn’t easy to decide because I didn’t want to get bored of taking a picture of the same thing over and over and for sure I knew I didn’t want to do a free theme because I wanted to focus and not just go and take a picture of whatever interested me that day..

And yes, people move people. I went on Twitter and commented that I wanted to do this and asked for recommendations, I got some responses and Soon, a twitter friend (his name is Soon) started talking to me and said he also wanted to do it. Great!

After a long day thinking of what specific theme I wanted to do, looking at different groups I found 365 colors, 365 venezuela, 365 my dog (not really), 365 crafting, 365 kids, 365 objects, 365 myself, etc. I didn’t see anything appealing and “easy enough” and decided I wanted to do my own thing with different themes every week! I didn’t find anything like this on flickr and, talking to Soon, I decided to create a Flickr group. =)

I went ahead and created the 365Challenge group. I wrote rules and started to invite people, set up my calendar to announce the themes for the week, created threads to help people to get started and everything was nice. After a week I had a few people join the group and I felt good because I wasn’t just doing something that I liked, but helping others to get motivated with photography.

At the beginning I started a parallel 365 self-portrait project but I dropped it after posting picture number 019/365. I had some creative stuff, I even Photoshopped myself into a cabaça but it was just too much so I decided to keep going with just the theme project.

Last year I had my first exhibition at Cranky’s Café, the theme for the exhibition was “LIC Textures” and I got the inspiration for the week of “textures” I did for the 365 Challenge, here is one of my favorite images from the series:

The rest of the year was cool, more people joined and a bunch were actually doing it, there was lots of participation in special challenges, photography conversations, regular chats about coffee, lots of comments in everybody’s images, some challenging themes and some easy ones to keep going and in general lots of learning. Eventually some people dropped or just started to post less and less but lots of us kept going.

One of the things I wanted to make clear is that you can join the group at any time, whenever you’re ready to start just do it. By the end of the year, a few of us were still there and happily finished the challenge, and I have to admit that I missed some days but recovered and took all my 365 pictures BUT still haven’t posted the last 20 on my Flickr! Yes, I know.. no excuses.

Right now the bad thing is that we just have two active members in the group and their motivation isn’t 100% even though they want to keep going and finish their project. I’m not participating this year or at least not now, but I’m still running the group and supporting them. To help a little more I joined this week for the theme “I see a face”, that’s why the picture at the beginning of the post but I feel it isn’t enough.

It’s better if there are people out there “fighting” with you and commenting about the challenge of photographing the theme.

Feel free to join the group even if you already started your own 365 project, and especially if you don’t have a theme or just to have a little more motivation.

Thanks for reading and I appreciate it if you made it all the way to the end.

A.

All the pictures used on this post were part of my 365 Challenge 2010.