Today’s photo: Alice isn’t sure green is her color.
Today’s lesson: Every little bit counts. If you don’t think you can do it all, just get up and do something.
Alice is already feeling bad about her New Year’s resolutions. She really wants to be all hopeful and proud of her chance for a new start like all of the treadmill people at the gym, but she just keeps staring at her hopes, thinking they are too big to lift on her own. I feel her pain. I do. That’s why my advice to Alice today is to forget about doing everything and just concentrate on doing something.
The lesson of a Project 365 of any sort, I think, is the lesson of the turtle and the hare. If you try too hard too quickly, you burn out and never get there. But if you just do one thing every day, you get where you want to go in your own due time.
These are my photography goals for 2013:
1. Use a dslr for my 365 instead of the phone and point-and-shoot combo I’ve used this past year.
2. Use mostly prime lenses.
3. Learn the basics of Photoshop.
4. Do more portrait photography.
5. Learn more portrait photography skills.
6. Write about what I have learned from my previous photo projects and about what I am continuing to learn.
7. Push myself to learn more about what my particular camera will do (as opposed to what all cameras will do).
So far I have started on 1, 2, and 6. I’m feeling bad because I am 5 days in, and I haven’t become a Photoshop master or done 20 portrait sessions (or even one, Alice aside). I’m trying hard to remind myself that I have the whole year. Past experience has taught me that as long as I keep picking up the camera every day, a year is plenty of time to show measurable progress on skills even if on most of the days it doesn’t seem like I’m accomplishing much of anything.
Alice isn’t sure green is her color. I’m not sure Photoshop is my bag. Check with us both at the end of the year to see how far we’ve moved along the slow path to progress.
