This project was really interesting. I started out bluntly, still a bit dozed from the new-years-eve party, maybe not fully realizing what I was putting myself into. But retrospectively, what I really wanted to do with this 365 was to try and get rid of the “opportunist-photographer” in me, the one that takes pretty landscape pictures and frame nice monuments and instead start improvising with less funky subjects, start being creative.

Somebody once told me something like An amateur photographer can take marvelous pictures, sometimes way better than a professional but mostly out of sheer luck. A professional will know how to create such an image and his pictures will be at least constantly good. This is exactly what – I think – the 365 is doing to its photographer: put him in a state of mind where he doesn’t know anymore what he should or could take ; where every object around him has been taken once and he doesn’t see his next move anymore. Then he will start considering new angles, make new things out of old and start being creative, not just opportunist.

The first wording I used for my intro was “… this important project I decided to inflict on myself”. While this sentence was too harsh – and that’s why I removed it - I wanted to use “inflict” because it was not fun everyday. Some days I had ideas, some days I went to bed to suddenly get up again realizing in a flash that I did not have my picture yet. And sometimes I went to bed to realize it’s past-midnight already ; so I posted a picture taken a couple days before or one I took the next day.

On the other hand, at many occasions I reached this state of mind I was looking for, a real lust to look around through those photographer eyes and see the world as a succession of potential pictures. When this happened, I surfed on this wave for as long as I could and gathered as many images as possible. But more often than not, it was the multiple reminders I set for myself that were the ones to push this state of mind on me. I wish I had created a little permanent studio in our flat to be able to play with light on a subject I have always at hand (myself) like a lot of 365-ers do.

This 365 made me realize some things about my cameras as well. I barely took the reflex out “just not convenient enough”. I used the Lx3 quite a lot, but not as much as my iPhone. This is really something that stuck me hard: mobile photography has helped me express myself throughout the whole day, take pictures of irrelevant day-to-day-things and try to make something out of it. On the other hand, I used a lot of filters from Camera+, not always for the best (huhu what did I have in mind taking such a pic?). I guess the camera will be a very important part of the decision-making process for my next phone after all (for the french readers, lense.fr published a very nice article going in this direction called “Photophonie, les 5 lecons à en tirer“).

Well, that wraps it up for 2011 ; you can have a look at all the pictures on flickr. Obviously I didn’t start a 365 for 2012, but I’ll be sure to plan a PADC with Ghusse this year. Thanks for watching, thanks for commenting, thanks for reading and happy photo-crafting in 2012!

]]> http://timothep.net/blog/2012/01/27/2011-in-365-pictures/feed/ 2 http://timothep.net/blog/2012/01/27/2011-in-365-pictures/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/timothepdotnet/~3/wqFv8fNb5Jg/ http://timothep.net/blog/2012/01/11/about-me/#comments Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:17:02 +0000 Tim http://timothep.net/blog/?p=4466 I recently resigned from my position at Siemens and yesterday way my last day on the job. In order for my former colleagues to keep in touch with me, I updated my about.me page to sum up my profiles and contact information.

It sure feels weird to leave all those colleagues and friends behind. But I’m really looking forward to my new job as I’ll be joining a small – human size – company beginning of February, coming back to the core of my business, creating software solutions full time myself.

To all my former RO colleagues still working on our Radiotherapy solutions, I wish good luck and a strong back wind for the time being. The world is damn small, we’ll sure see each other again!