Picking up the camera again

In passing

Sunset at the Rote Fabrik

Alternate shot: Evening commute

I've been vaguely intending for a while now to do one of those "365 photos" projects of some form, and now that I've finished the thesis I really have no excuse anymore.

I've had a frustrating relationship with photography for a while now--occasionally I get told I'm good at it, and I have a nice digital SLR and a lot of lenses that are fun to use. The problem is that, for me, the best part of the whole thing is lining up a shot and clicking the button--after that, it's a small challenge to make myself even download the pictures off the camera, and a huge challenge to review them and decide which ones are worth keeping, publishing, etc. (I won't even touch the idea of post-processing--I will occasionally crop a photo, but only when the limits of lens speed or focal length prevented my framing it to my satisfaction in the first place. I don't do Photoshop; to me, that's something that graphic designers do, and I am not one.) So eventually, since I have such a hard time making myself look at the photos I take, I never see any results. When I don't see the result, I stop feeling the joy of pressing the shutter button, and then my camera lies unused for a year.

I'm still not completely sure I'll stick this out for a whole year. Instead, I've taken a friend's suggestion to start small--today marked seven days, and yesterday I concluded that I could at least run to 30. Some days I even get enthusiastic enough, or indecisive enough, to include an "alternate" (e.g. photo #3 here) in the main photostream. If I'm still clicking away in May, I'll take the larger plunge. In the meantime, I'm hoping that 30 days will at least get me to stop being so irritatingly self-conscious about having a camera in my hand.

And maybe, by the end of it, I'll even be willing to go through the photos I took while on honeymoon. I think no one except Mike even knew that those existed.