I am a software engineer having worked as an IT consultant for four years. My job began to feel too meaningless and predictable, so I decided to quit my job and take some time off, while thinking about my next career move.
About a year ago I took up photography and I knew that I wanted to something creative taking photographs in my “vacation”. So I gave myself a 60-day challenge, taking a single photograph each day.
In this post I will describe the process of the challenge and throughout January I will each day publish a new set of photos and my thoughts about the photos.
rules
The challenge consists of two parts each 30 days; the first parts is all about creating photographs with very tight limitations, and the second parts is about recreating the first 30 photographs but with any other limitations.
Each day of part one, you get a word and a location – these I generated via a small program, I wrote.
The rules of the first 30 days (November) are:
- Go to the designated location in Copenhagen.
- Look at today’s word.
- Take one single photograph of the word.
- Don’t look at the photo, but put it in an envelope.
- Write a small caption for the photo and put it in the envelope.
This produces 30 envelopes with a picture and a caption in each envelope – these will be used in the second part.
The rules of the second 30 days (December) are:
- Take out today’s envelope.
- Look at the caption, but not the picture.
- Recreate the photo with a single shot.
The recreation should not be a 1-to-1 recreation but rather trying to find a similar subject, feeling or even composition. After taking the second photo, you compare the two photographs to see which similarities and differences they have.
The purpose of the rules are to impose such strict limitations, that the photographer won’t be overwhelmed with all kinds of possible subjects.
technology
Being a programmer I made my own little program to generate locations and words for each of the days in the first part of the challenge. I generated 30 days, each day having a word (subject) and a location. Each day I had printed page like this one:
I also made a list of links to the locations on Google Maps, that I could use each day to travel to the right location.
If you want to take a look at my code, you can find it on my Github profile. I might expand the code and make more features in the coming time.
equipment
My camera for the challenge was a polaroid camera – a Fujifilm Instax Square. The reason for using this, and not my DSLR was to limit my options even further. I didn’t want to get lost in thinking about ISO, aperture, lenses, focal length, etc., so using a simple camera with only very few options (auto, macro, landscape) seemed like a good choice for the task.
It had the extra bonus of producing physical photos – which are more fun than digital photos – and the photos develop so slowly, that you can put them in an envelope before you get to see the result.