This article was written January 7, 2024
For the month of December, my primary goal was to spend some time daily (ideally at least 30 minutes) taking pictures with my DSLR camera. This goal I did accomplish. However, I was also planning to make weekly videos on my YouTube channel documenting my journey. This was a massive failure (Spoilers, I did not release a single video beyond the initial announcement of December in Photography). Afterwards, once I’d finally set up this blog, I planned to release one post per day. This also hasn’t been going so great (By the time of writing this, I’m at two blog posts for December in Photography, and each of those took me multiple day, each with multiple hours of effort). With this out of the way, let’s discuss what went well, what didn’t go so well, what I’ve learned, and what’s in reserve for the future.
What went well?
Let’s start with what went well. I did manage to put time aside every single day for Photography. It wasn’t exactly easy: there were many days where it felt like a complete chore to get started. Honestly, I got worried at some point that I wouldn’t manage to complete it. However, I still pulled through, although my wavering motivation resulted in often taking pictures after dark, which is definitely a more complicated task.
On the plus side, despite the fact that I often had trouble motivating myself, once I actually got out and got my camera ready, things went smoothly. I was enjoying myself. I found the process fun, interesting, and even relaxing at times. I definitely never regretted doing it once it was underway.
Another thing I think went well: it pushed me to create this blog and start making posts, somewhat regularly. Granted, I don’t have a lot of posts out yet, but I think it’s still a good start that I should be happy with. It got a new habit in place.
What didn’t go well?
As mentioned earlier, I had a lot of trouble releasing videos or posts. But why is that? Unfortunately, I massively underestimated how much effort it would be to look through a bunch of pictures to review and analyze them. Turns out that it’s easy to take a lot of different pictures in a short time, but going through all of them and actually trying to analyze them is a lot more time-consuming. Ultimately, I think this might have been the wrong challenge to start with, considering how disproportionate the effort needed for retrospection is.Another thing that didn’t go too great was keeping up with my reading material, Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson. Things were ok initially, but as the month dragged on, I eventually stopped reading it, and missed out on useful information that could have been valuable, only learning these things after the end of the month while finishing the book (If you’re interesting in photography, I definitely recommend the book).
Along a similar vein, I believe not reviewing my pictures until after the end of the challenge stifled my learning experience. I think retrospection is an important part of learning, and so is being able to apply what the lessons of the retrospection afterwards, to iterate. And as with most such processes, a shorter feedback loop is ideal.
What I’ve learned
Obviously, I did learn a few things about photography. However, I think I’ll leave a lot of this out for a dedicated post. My main takeaways are about exposure, framing and my own personal preferences.
Next, I now realize how important continually retrospecting is, but also how much effort that can be in itself for some projects (in particular for photography). Because of this, I better understand the importance of accountability and of tackling more manageable chunks. I also realize it’s important to have a notion of how complex and time-consuming tasks will be, while also acknowledging it’s hard to assess without first-hand experience. My initial goal of weekly videos was definitely unreasonable in retrospect, but I did not initially realize the scope of such and undertaking.
If I were to tackle a photography challenge again, I would probably adapt it in one of two ways:
- Limiting the amount of pictures I review and present (Maybe have a limit of x good pictures and y bad pictures to analyze)
- Diminish the frequency to have more time for the the retrospection. For example, taking picture every other day, maybe using the extra day to learn photography post-processing as well. Then I’d have more time to analyze the pictures.
I also think it might be useful for my learning to be more “guided”. For example, I could try to focus on a specific aspect of the skill each week. When trying to learn a new skill, there are usually many different things to tackle. For example, in this case I could have approached either different kinds of subjects (Indoors, buildings, nature, traffic, night, etc…) or different techniques (Framing, exposure, aperture vs shutter speed, focus, flash photography, etc…). This would probably have helped limit the scope of the daily blog posts as well.
For future projects, I think it’ll important to have an initial trial period to see how much effort is involved with each part, possibly a week, and then adapt accordingly.
The future
So, what about the missing days of December in Photography? Currently, my thoughts are that I want to start with my next project, for which I will have a separate post. My biggest goal for December in Photography at this point is to complete December 30 and 31. After that, I might go through the remaining days, although with a more limited scope, possibly only keeping the best pictures (and also interesting ones even if they’re not great), and limiting in-depth conversations to interesting topics I haven’t covered yet. But as I don’t want to tie myself down too much at this point (it would only end in disappointment and stress), I’m not making any promises.
Final Thoughts
Despite the fact that multiple aspects of this could be considered a failure, I think it was still a great learning experience for me and I’m glad I tackled this challenge. I also had a lot of fun doing it, although there was definitely some stress involved. I hope you enjoyed my thoughts on this, and the existing posts.