It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned my One a Day photography project, but it seems worthy of note that another 6 months have now passed; we’re now headed into the second half of “One a Day Project – Year 4”. Time flies.

Since I know that there are new readers have joined the blog since the last time I talked about this project, it’s probably worth a quick pause to explain what this project is about. Back on August 28, 2007, I started taking photos everyday, choosing one photo as the photo of that day. I.e., I picked “One Photo a Day” – hence the “One a Day” project. Chris actually came up with the idea as a way to learn how to use his (then new) camera. He started the project day before I did, but he only lasted for 100 days. I’ve kept going: I still take at least one photo everyday, including today, which marks day #1653. Not all the photos are what I call “5 star” efforts, of course. But I also like to experiment quite a bit, and experimentation can lead to great things sometimes … just not all the time. 😉

Anyway, as I have at every milestone in this project, recently I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’ve been doing, in order to decide whether or not I’m going to continue. Since the actual 6 month mark was on February 27th, and since I said above that I’m still doing it as of today, you already know I’ve decided to keep going a while longer.

But why do I like the OAD Project and what keeps me going? Well, as I’ve said all along the way, the projects gives me the freedom to explore new photographic ideas. OK, yes, recently, there are many days when I take the “same old” photo of that postcard shot on the Neckar, for example. But, even when I do that, I’m still also trying new angles, looking for interesting variations on the theme. As I said, not all experiments are successful – my OAD pick that day may well just wind up being that same old postcard shot in the end, if nothing else worked out. But, still, I like the challenge of seeing what else I can do with it.

The other thing I enjoy is that I find I am always looking for possible photographic subjects as I wander around. This has forced me to make sure I always have a camera with me. Early on I didn’t always carry a camera with me, of course, mostly because my preferred camera continues to be my Nikon dSLR with an 18-200mm zoom lens, and that’s just too heavy to trudge around town with while I run errands or go to class.

However, I have taken to carrying our little point-and-shoot camera (currently a Casio) in my bag or pocket, so that I’m always ready to snap a photo if I see something interesting. I have had, over the years, a love-hate relationship with our various point-and-shoot cameras. But the more practice I’ve had with these cameras, though, the more comfortable I have become with their quirks and limitations. Without the excuse and motivation of the OAD project, I don’t think I would have had the patience to put in the time with them. However, my experiments with them have paid off … 6 of the 14 photos in my recent “Reflections” exhibit were taken with that camera, not with my fancier Nikon.

And it’s worth a note that almost all of those “postcard shots” you’ve seen here on the blog have been taken with that Casio on my way to/from my class.

About the only thing I don’t like about the OAD project is that I never have enough time to sort through all the photos. In an ideal world, I’d have time every day to sort the photos and actually select my OAD pick for the day, but that rarely happens. I always think I’ll have scads of time during vacations, or class breaks, or whenever, to go back through and properly sort all the photos. I have this idea that someday I will organize all of them in some logical fashion.

Perhaps that day will actually come … but I’m become less certain I will ever have time for it, since there’s always another project that crops up that slips in front of it. There’s a quote … not in a song! … from the musical, The Music Man, where Harold Hill tells a kid “I always think there’s a band, kid, ” even though there never is band in Harold Hill’s world. I think that’s like me and my idea of definitively organizing my OAD project photos … I always think I’ll get to that, but, like Harold Hill’s band, the time in which to sort through all the OAD photos never really happens.

But as I have always said about our travels and our life in other countries, it is the journey that’s important. What struck me over the weekend, as I was thinking about the project, and my unsorted photos from January and earlier, is that maybe it isn’t important if I ever have that definitive sorting moment at all. After all, it’s having fun with the photos and trying new things with my photography which brings me joy. When I periodically have time to sort through a subset of photos, I also enjoy the serendipity of discovering that some of my experiments actually worked out better than I’d expected.

So that keeps me going with the OAD Project, as I head toward the 5 year mark. Stay tuned.

BTW, February 27, 2012 was a “school day”, and I did indeed take my photos that day on the way to school. Photos of the “postcard shot”, albeit in the fog, actually. Below you’ll see two variations on that shot that were candidates for my OAD pick for that day. However, it’s the third shot that’s my pick of the day to mark 4.5 years: something that’s not the standard postcard shot. It’s a photo where I waited for that duck in the lower right-hand corner of the photo to turn just so, as though looking off in the distance at that delicately reflected tree, which was my preferred subject for that photo.

Enjoy.

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P.S. Funnily enough, my post at the 3.5 year mark last year was called “Reflections”, which only goes to show that I really was interested in reflection photos before I moved to Tübingen and started taking all those postcard shots of the Neckar River. Note that … while I could have called this post “Reflections on 4.5 years”, or something like that, I didn’t, in keeping with my promise yesterday to not use that in the title of a blog post. At least for a little while. 😉