OK, it’s barely year three.
Yesterday was actually the final day of year two. 731 consecutive days of shooting, editing, organizing, processing and then posting at least one shot on Instagram @brokawphoto
So now I am into year three and I’ve posted my daily photos for the day.
It is an interesting practice. A good discipline. I’m not really a pretty picture kind of photographer. I doubt any of my shots would win an award. I’m more of a street, photojournalistic kind of shooter.
I shoot with an Olympus Tough TG-5. Waterproof, shockproof, Billbrokawproof. It’s about the size of a pack of cigarettes and fits nicely in my pocket. It’s tough as nails which is good, because I’m pretty tough on my stuff.
My first choice for subjects is people. People doing stuff or even just looking at the camera.
Sometimes it’s candid, frequently it’s with permission. “Can I take your picture?”
Sometimes I know the people, mostly I don’t. Of course, not everyone is happy to have me take their photo but a surprising amount of people are OK with it.
I also love quirky and topical stuff. The weirder, the better. I frequently find myself turning around after driving past something interesting. I’ve photographed a lot of interesting mailboxes. Some people have interesting mailboxes.
The 2020 presidential election certainly provided plenty of weird and topical stuff to shoot.
Of course I love nature too and beautiful light but the image quality of my little camera kinda sucks so my natural photos would stand up to being enlarged. No matter, I still shoot when the light is right. Resistance is futile.
Over the course of the last two years I’ve generated about 7500 images and posted about 1000 of them on Instagram. Only a handful of people actually see them, but that’s not why I post them. It’s the personal obligation to deliver each and everyday.
Seth Godin would call it Shipping. Everyday I ship.
I’m even on Google Street View get a shot.
My 7500 images are named and organized by date are readily accessed via a single Lightroom catalog.
I shoot Olympus RAW (.orf), edit out the clunkers in Adobe Bridge, rename with the date and stash in a new folder for the day. I then import into Lightroom, process and refine the photos and export as low res jpegs for possible posting. I can readily put my muddy hands on any photo I’ve done with my pocketkamera since I started this project back in 2018.
Where to from here? I dunno. Just keep shooting and posting. Maybe I’ll do a show, or a book. Maybe I’ll make a bunch of prints and store them in a box (prints don’t crash). Hopefully I’ll be writing another blog post like this November 5th 2021.