Project 365 · 1 December 2012 — 30 November 2013
One photograph a day, for a year.
I shot extreme sports. Mostly my own riders, at our own events, in the years I was running Shark Cartel. Then I decided to publish one photograph every day for a year, to find out whether the inspiration would hold.
The project
31-day test, then a yearIn 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.
The work
28 frames · click any oneThe portfolio I picked in 2013, unchanged. Skate and snow. Some still carry the watermark I used for the first six months and then abandoned.
The kit
2003 — 2013Nine 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.
- ~2003A digital cameraPoint it, press the button, get a photo. That was the whole technique for a while.
- 2005 — 2010Canon 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 2010Canon EOS 500D, 18-55 ISFirst DSLR. It took six months before I really understood what I was holding.
- 2011Canon 7DThe 500D was stolen. The 7D replaced it and stayed. I called it Mr Seven Dee for long enough that the name stuck.
- +6 monthsFirst L-lensThen another six months wrestling with sharpness and fast focus before the first external flash.
- ThroughoutLightroomI 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.
What a year of it taught me
from the posts, 2013“There are people with the most expensive lenses and bodies who know every technical detail of their equipment, and nothing about the art of photography itself.”Photography Equipment Is Overrated · January 2013
“I do not like watermarks. They are ugly and they destroy the composition I carefully chose. In six months I found 23 photos misused anyway. So they went.”No Watermark For Me · May 2013
“Creation should not be limited by the tools available. It took time and effort to work out how to do that with the tools at hand.”Project 365: Finished · November 2013
“If you photograph an athlete in action, you have to show why that moment is worth looking at. Otherwise it is just a person in the air.”Composition: Put It In Perspective · March 2013