Project 365: Admitting defeat
- At May 21, 2008
- By Neil Creek
- In People
6
I can’t deny it any longer. I’m never going to finish Project 365, the attempt to take and upload at least one photo every day for a year. Regular readers of my blog will notice that the number of P365 blog posts recently have decreased significantly, and when they are posted, they’re photos taken weeks ago. Well unfortunately, due to a variety of reasons – including Naomi’s injury, my own laziness, and the urgency of work deadlines – I’ll be unable to complete Project 365.
Was it a waste of time? Hell no! Even though I didn’t succeed in meeting the goals of the project, it is possibly the most important thing I’ve ever done for my development as a photographer.
I’m planning to write a full “debrief” on my experience with Project 365 in a future blog post, but for now I’m going to publicly state that I no longer intend to complete it. I will however, post photos that I have taken between the date of my last P365 entry and today. The photos below are some of these.
Taken on a visit to Mum’s for afternoon tea, the first photo is of a delicious strawberry sponge cake baked by Mum. The second is Mum with family friend Barbara.
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Look out for a few more photo posts in the coming days as I post the backlog without having to worry about “filling in the gaps” of P365 posts.
6 comments
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Antoine Khater
I have tried and failed twice to do a PAD :(
I just couldn’t commit
laanba
At least you tried. I know there is NO way that I could take and upload a photo a day. And that strawberry cake looks delicious!
Tim Linden
You could “cheat” and publish posts in the future. Then you have a week or two already queued so if you miss a day your fine.
Damien Franco
Don’t feel bad. I couldn’t even finish the my community 52 over at photoblog.org and that’s just one image a week!
I’m way too busy, and also my creativity really runs in spurts, but like you, my observations were that it really was worthwhile to give it a go.
As soon as my schedule permits, I’ll be starting the 365 project myself. The hardest part for me is uploading to the internet, not the actual photography part.
Niels Henriksen
Hi Neil:
I take a strong objection to your use of the word “Defeat”. Not in a negative view, but more emotional point of view. Well maybe not that strong an objection.
I personally hate the term, especially when it comes to our goals, projects and other aspirations in life. To me defeat implies a combative contest, in which there is a victor and the defeated.
All in fact you are doing is ending your project; maybe early if not all your goals were not met. There is no defeat.
Did you enjoy it?
Did you learn things?
Did you help others?
I think maybe you did for each of the above and therefore I think your project was a SUCESS.
I have spent over 20 years dealing with project management in very large scale IT projects and I have come to a special understanding as to what is successful and what might be failures. Not all y PM peers and especially government audit groups hold the same view as I do.
My view is that when you ar4e repeating projects that have been done before, then it is easier to establish proper metrics and benchmarks for success.
For projects that have never been done before by the organization or person in this case, you, it is almost impossible to gauge metrics for success. I know that your metric of a photo-a-day for 365 days seems like a easy one to establish and meet, but if you have never done this before how do you really know that this was the right metric to use.
Let me try to elaborate and guess a bit.
Was your goal to
Take a photo a day?
Publish a photo a day?
Publish it the same day it was taken?
Any combination above?
You could have set your camera up on a tripod and had it on a timer so once a day to took a photo and published ti to the web. 365 days later, Voila complete.
I think you were trying for quality photos, that had meaning and artistic merit at least from what I saw.
The reason for these long ramblings is that I think that is very important that we never use negative words to describe our actions, unless what we are doing is hurting people.
I thin your title should have been,
“365 Project ending – Lessons learned to follow”
I am not sure that this will come across right, words without feelings are hard to convey, as I really am not critical of you and only wish well for you and your family.
From the other
Niels with the wired spelling.
Michelle Primmer
Neil – I just saw a link to this post – I did a ‘photo a day’ for my ’40th year’ I started the day after my 39th birthday and finished the day of my 40th birthday! It was a great project – some days were harder than others. I printed the photos and put them in an album with diary-like journalling. It will be great to look back on. My Mum also did it for her 60th year and I have several friends doing it for ‘2009’.