One photograph a day, for a year.

In December 2012 I ran a 31-day test: publish one photo a day and see if the enthusiasm survived. It did. So I kept going for a year.

The subject was almost always extreme sports. Snowboarding, skateboarding, skiing, snowskating. Most of the people in these frames were riders I sponsored, which meant the photography and the company were never really separate things. I was shooting my own team.

I missed twelve days across the year and made up every one of them. On 30 November 2013 there were 365 photographs I actually liked, which was the whole point. Some were taken that morning. Some were pulled from years earlier and finally given the attention they deserved.

Nine out of ten questions I got were about equipment. Equipment is the least interesting part of this, and I say that as someone who owned all of it.

• ~2003
  A digital cameraPoint it, press the button, get a photo. That was the whole technique for a while.
• 2005 — 2010
  Canon Ixus 700Five years on a compact. Thousands of frames, plus every photography book and article I could find. I made photographs on that camera I still like.
• Summer 2010
  Canon EOS 500D, 18-55 ISFirst DSLR. It took six months before I really understood what I was holding.
• 2011
  Canon 7DThe 500D was stolen. The 7D replaced it and stayed. I called it Mr Seven Dee for long enough that the name stuck.
• +6 months
  First L-lensThen another six months wrestling with sharpness and fast focus before the first external flash.
• Throughout
  LightroomI started with cropping and auto-tune. By the end I treated the exposure as a silhouette I still had to paint with the emotion of the moment.

If someone asks me today what to buy, the answer has not changed: get a cheap camera that is good enough, and spend the money you saved on learning composition and light.