Project 365 january 2009
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Photographing a new image, every day for a year.
by
Aaron Spence
Project 365
is an attempt to shoot a photograph every day for a year. For me it has many benefits, not the least of which is a wonderful documentation of my life, family & work. I’m finding the project is also rekindling the joy of photography just for the sake of it, by forcing me to think about photography in a creative way at least once per day, not just for my work. As I write this I’ve been shooting for 1 month, January 2009, and have over that time figured a basic set of rules which apply to ‘my’ project 365. 1. Shoot an image every day. 2. Failing that, use an image from a day or 2 either side of ‘the’ day. 3. Failing that, use a very old image, preferably from the film era. The image should either be very good, have a great story, or show something personally significant. 4. All photographs should be either, great images, interesting events/articles/people, personally significant or documentation of something that occurred on the day. Aaron Spence. www.panedia.com @aaronspence
http://photos.panedia.com/365
January 1st, 2009 At around 8pm on 01/01/09 Morgan Parker tweeted that she was going to attempt a daily image for 2009 having only lasted a couple of weeks in 2008. Now with no original thoughts of my own, and seeing this done a number of times previously... I decided I’d do the same. Of course at 8pm I lacked subject matter, time & the will to do anything fancy for the first image. So I grabbed my Nikon D700 + 16mm fisheye, which was attached to my pano rig, walked outside to snap the wading pool we’d set up for Elijah earlier that day. I grabbed a few snaps, and decided I wanted my feet in the image... to show something of me in the very first picture. It also added strength to the composition forming somewhat of an upside down triangle for the viewers eye to wander around the image.
January 2nd, 2009 These woeful images were taken on my phone... which I just found out from the EXIF data has a 4.9mm f3.2 lens. This is heartbreak hill behind my home. The first image shows stage 1, which leads onto stage 2 (image 2) as you turn the corner at the top. It is VERY steep & rocky... the photos don’t do it justice, really.
January 3rd, 2009
Here’s the wading pool from 2 days ago. This time in the rain, and closeup. Nice raindrops are forming on the skin. This is shot on the trusty Panasonic LX-1 with its 16:9 sensor. No cropping, just some noise reduction (lots of noise on the LX-1, noise ninja does a great job cleaning it up) and curves applied.
January 4th, 2009
We went for a drive to the rainforest of Tamborine Mountain today. Elijah slept on the way up (20mins) then become David Attenborough on speed when he entered the forrest. We had a running commentry & boy the entire time... I believe he pointed out every single tree & rock. I didn’t take the camera on the walk as it was overcast & dark in the forest. [Mistake] Fortunately this stunning Strangler Fig was near the start of the walk, so I came back with the camera later to shoot it.
OK, 5 days into the photo a day project and I’m cheating already. This image was taken yesterday, Sunday the 4th of January 2009. I shot a number of images I liked yesterday, so here’s another of them. We had Abi, my niece, for a sleepover on Saturday night, so here we are having breakfast Sunday morning.... errrh, well this was a couple of
January 5th, 2009
minutes after breakfast when I realised... I should have had the camera out during breakfast. We were impressed with Abi’s ladybug bag too... when I noticed it in the background I decided the splash of colour & 3 points of interest in the image might work well. ie the 2 faces & the ladybug, it sets up a triangle.
January 6th, 2009
I headed over to Steve Dalton’s place (@spidie, refactor.com.au) to drop off a server this morning. The Refactor dudes were there... I took a pic of them & the office... but as I was leaving I noticed the new car. Quandary.... do I show the best image, or the image that best represents what I was doing there? I’ve gone for best image, sorry Steve :)
January 7th, 2009
The Green Crumple. Sounds like a lame action hero name. This is a building site barrier at Helensvale Plaza on the Gold Coast. So many cars have hit it when backing out that it’s twisted & folded all over the place. So it makes for some interesting texture. Looking at it now I think I should have lowered my angle a little more to make the lines vertical & parallel.
January 8th, 2009 Here’s 3.5yr old Elijah on his 2 week old scooter. He absolutely flies around the kitchen, taking sharp corners fast and hanging his little body way out wide to balance the gforces and speed. Then he smashes regularly... 3yr olds are not known for their powers of lengthy concentration.... whinges for a moment and jumps back on to go screaming around the kitchen again. His legs are black and blue, I hope no one from DOCS sees him, we’ll be accused of all sorts of crimes. I’m extremely impressed with his speed, balance and fearlessness. Is there any money in pro scootering ;) I feel another cheat coming on. I have another fantastic scootering image that I might use tomorrow... shhhhh, don’t tell anyone.
January 9th, 2009
So yesterday I said I may cheat with today’s image, and in fact I did. This is from the same sequence of images shot on the 8th of Jan. I just couldn’t leave it out. Today the little guy started doing tricks, like zooming along then holding one leg high in the air & to the front of him, I’ll have to get some action shots of that.
January 10th, 2009
Today was a big work around the house day. Weeding, cleaning the car, cleaning the house etc. In order to clean the patio Michelle moved all the chairs onto the back lawn. Later in the day as the sun was getting low I liked the look of the black and white against the green. I could have moved the chairs around into some sort of nice composition... but since I was destroyed from digging out hundreds of weeds... I grabbed some shots, moved the chairs back to the patio then hit the shower.
January 11th, 2009
Now really, don’t call DOCS, he was having a fun time doing this with his great friend Drummond. In fact after doing it a few more times the 2 of them were disappointed when we said... that’s enough with the ball in the face. Despite the distressed look of the bottom right image there were no tears, only laughs once they hit the thick, soft grass. So we had our good friends Darren & Benita Paine + their 3 boys over for a Sunday BBQ lunch as we hadn’t seem them for weeks, what with them being on a big road trip to Melbourne and all. A great time was had by all.
January 12th, 2009
Today I had a quick shoot to do for Inovita, the Australian importer of Vitra high quality bathroom gear. The Turkish manufacturer does up a semi-regular book to showcase the projects their product go into all around the world. So we shot Allisee a 200 apartment Stocklands project at Runaway bay
on the Gold Coast. It’s a beautiful place, where they’ve made a mini marina in the middle of the complex. We had near constant cloud for the 1.5hrs of shooting... which made for nice soft light, so we were looking for positions where a little blue would peak through the clouds.
January 13th, 2009
I love this shot. Like all these images it only exists because I’m forcing myself to shoot ‘almost’ daily for this project, and I’m enjoying it far more than I expected to. Elijah’s $20 scooter broke today, the front wheel fell off after 3 weeks. So he’s back to 3 wheels now on his ultra cool trike, given to him by grandparents on his 2nd birthday. He likes to search the skies for planes... a few months ago he told us the things he’s going to be able to do when he grows up. They are in order: Build a car, Fly a spaceship & Wash the dishes :)
January 14th, 2009
I grabbed this snap with my pano rig while on a job tonight. I was shooting panoramas of a prize home at Emerald Lakes on the Gold Coast for a charity. I said I’d grab some images of the estate as well, that they may want to use. Unbeknown to me the estate was old European looking in parts and very cool. I’ll have a panorama to show for tomorrow.
Porto Bellago at Emerald Lakes is a very cool looking place. Modeled after old world Italy, it is one of a number of European enclaves they’re creating on this estate. This image is a section of a stitched panoramic virtual tour. You can check out all the panoramic virtual tours I shot here. http://link.panedia.com/vst-emeraldlakes BTW: this is a cheat, as I shot it yesterday.... but I did stitch it today :)
January 15th, 2009
January 16th, 2009
This is not the sort of shot I’d normally bother with, but from today’s shoot it stood out. I’m not going to tell you what it is, as it doesn’t matter, but you’re more than welcome to guess :)
January 17th, 2009
There I was editing & uploading the past few days photos to this gallery, when into my office inched a sad little fella. He doesn’t have a scooter anymore, it broke a couple of days ago, so now he’s reduced to this.
January 18th, 2009 I headed into the hardware store today to look at mowers & brush cutters, since I fired my lawn mowing mob I’ll need to buy my own gear to do it. Thrilling stuff I assure you. In a big warehouse style shop the main photographic target is PATTERN. In this case I’ve zeroed in on some basil... which reminds me of a funny story. Jamie Oliver (Naked Chef ) did a project in the UK to help lift the standard of school food. He zeroed in on a family and gave them a shopping list of ‘good’ food to buy. The mum saw basil on the list, and said hmm... don’t know what that looks like. When she eventually found a bag of basil she said, “This is just leaves... it must be a garnish” LOL, made me laugh. Anything green is garnish to me ;)
All going well, this lovely room is where baby number 2 will be born on Easter Sunday 2009. It’s one of the new birthing suites at the Gold Coast Hospital. Elijah was born a few doors down at the clinical looking rooms, with just a bed & a toilet/shower in them. You can’t see the kitchenette with fridge & microwave in this shot :)
January 19th, 2009
January 20th, 2009 This is Jupiters Casino at Broadbeach on the Gold Coast. I was out shooting panoramic virtual tours late this afternoon/evening, I ended up with about 40 panos over 3hrs. This image is from a pano sequence, but it’s not from a stitched file. I always shoot the first image facing north, so the 6 images I shoot horizontally fall where they may. In this instance, the casino across the water fell perfectly within a single shot of the Nikon 16mm fullframe fisheye lens. I haven’t cropped the width one pixel. The building curves around, so even though it’s shot with a fisheye, it’s doesn’t look very distorted. All in all a very serendipitous photo.
January 21st, 2009
Elijah’s artwork. I was lazy today and just shot an image that’s up on our wall. Being a photographer with any number of amazing images to put on the wall... we have none on our walls. All we have is finger painting. I was pleasantly surprised at the silver paint showing so much reflectivity with the flash, it looks good.
January 22nd, 2009
Self Portrait. I’ve got a number of client meetings & shoots coming up, starting today. So after about 2 months of growing this furry beast on my face it’s time for it to leave. It was a full beard until a week or 2 ago, then I shaved it to a goatee. Today it became my usual clippered No.1 beard. I wanted to document it, as I don’t think I’ll have a beard this long again any time soon.
January 23rd, 2009
Into The Darkness. I was on a pano shoot today when the client walked across my view, I grabbed the shot. The humidity was off the chart today, so I was soon drenched in perspiration on this shoot. When I’m on my own I don’t mind that, but when I’m with clients it’s not nice.
January 24th, 2009
Blowing bubbles in the back yard on a Saturday afternoon. The photo is actually much better than the experience was. The wind was blowing quite hard, as shown by the dramatic change in direction on the bubbles & the bubble thingy was only working 1 in 3 tries. Still it’s a nice shot. I also like the shadow on the grass forming a funnel whose origin starts at Elijah’s mouth. Totally unintentional, but a nice touch.
January 25th, 2009 I was real late in looking for a photo for today, so at 7pm I grabbed the camera on a rainy night & headed outside hoping for a tiny bit of sunlight off in the cloudy distance... but there was none to be found.
I shot some images on the road, some streetlight reflections, some running water over rocks (we were dumping water from our overflowing water tank) all pretty lame shots... then a car zoomed past, I panned and grabbed a shot... beautiful. A couple more came past, this was the 2nd car.
January 26th, 2009
Australia Day. Both Michelle & I were quite unwell today, so we didn’t end up leaving the house. It was also bucketing down rain a lot of the morning. Late in the day I headed outside to find an image to shoot. The next door neighbours were farewelling all their party guests of the day, Elijah ran over & started playing with the kids. As the last car left they lined up to race it down the street.
January 27th, 2009
I had a get together with some fine Gold Coast IT people this morning. We met at a gorgeous coffee shop called Bumbles Cafe, I highly recommend it. We occupied the ‘Blue’ room and this shot is from my seat at the end of the very cool table.
East. Another day another cheat. This is a rectilinear still image extracted from a spherical panorama I shot last night & stitched today.
The place is called East, and it is gorgeous. You really should check out the full set of virtual tours I shot there as well http://link.panedia.com/east88 No really, do yourself a favour & check them out... you won’t be disappointed :)
January 28th, 2009
January 29th, 2009 You’ll never guess where we had dinner tonight... we haven’t eaten here in ages. I was going to head to the inaugural Gold Coast Social Media club meetup tonight, but my nose was running off my face, & I wasn’t feeling great, so I bailed at the last minute. Earlier when I mentioned I was going out Michelle said “I wish I could have a night off”. Sooo... once I decided not to infect a room full of social media people with my cold, I determined to do it to a room full of Hungry Jacks customers instead. I’d go out for dinner with Elijah & give mum a night off. She didn’t like that. So I said OK, I’ll stay home with Elijah, and you go out. No? In the end, she came to Hungry Jacks with us, and everyone was happy :) For anyone not in Australia, this is Burger King. There’s various myths as to why we ended up with Hungry Jacks instead of Burger King... you’ll have to look it up for yourself.
January 30th, 2009
A Break In The Storm Clouds For Sunset. Yep, the title pretty much sums it up. Another lazy shot from my driveway :)
January 31st, 2009
You Are What You Eat. Elijah & Michelle made a face out of his lunch. It started with pita bread and a bit of sauce for eyes & mouth. When I came back 5 minutes later it was a culinary & artistic delight. With Ham Hair, Tomato Eyes, Cucumber Ears & Nose, Saucy Mouth, Cheese & Chicken Beard & Jay Leno Chin, it not only looked good, it tasted great :)
January 31st, 2009
Rollin, Rollin, Rollin... Project 365 is rolling along perfectly at the moment. Today marks the end of the first month, and again, I’m extremely pleased I started the project. Whereas every other month in my life has no permanent daily record, this one does. Today I’ve uploaded 2 images, as I liked both Elijah rolling & his lunch. Panning with a moving object is pretty easy with a bit of practice... but panning & spinning with a rolling object is, not surprisingly, much harder. Elijah came and got me ‘cause he wanted to show me his cool somersaults & back flips on the bed. I grabbed the camera & took a stack of shots.
To see my latest images: http://photos.panedia.com/365