>>3247486>take a photo every day. that's literally it, no theme, nothingThis is an excellent idea.
> frankly it has made me realise how little I am able to take any meaningful photographsThat's gonna happen, especially when you're just starting out. The people who fail at their 365 projects see that, go "Well, I'll never get better", and give up. The ones who succeed go "Well fuck. Guess I'd better try harder tomorrow". You're always going to have off days where you take a shit photo. If you keep at it, though, you'll find that the off days start to become less frequent.
A long time ago, I was having an argument with someone over whether it would help you succeed more to do a 365 or a 52. I.e., he was telling me that he'd do a better job if he really put a week's worth of effort into getting one really good shot in that week. My argument was that if I just put a day's worth of effort into getting a good shot every day and then went back and picked out the best shot of the week each week, I'd have a much better 52 project than he would. To test that theory, I actually went back and picked out my best 52 from the years I'd been doing 365s. What I discovered was this:
Year 1: Some weeks, it was hard to pick a best one because they all sucked
Year 2: It was usually pretty easy to pick a best one
Year 3: It was super easy to pick a best one
Year 4+: It started getting hard again because my weeks had too many good ones and it was hard to pick a best.
(Side note: The guy who was arguing so strongly that his 52-project idea was better took a grand total of one picture and then gave up. It was a shitty picture of the film he was planning to use for the rest.)
So just keep at it. Keep at it, and maybe even keep going after this year's done. Post all of the pictures in your Flickr or whatever so you can go back and look at how far you've come. It's a great feeling to be able to say that you've taken a picture every single day for a year.
