In what has become a year-end PetaPixel tradition, photographic artist B.A. Van Sise—who has the unusual practice of making one, and only one, photograph on film every single day— looks back on the past year and towards the next. His previous entries can be found for 2018, 2019, and 2020. More images from this series, titled The Infinite Present, can be seen on the artist’s website.
There are 365 ways to waste your time being busy instead of doing useful work. One of those is the popular concept of a 365 photo project. Let’s dive in and see why it is one of the best ways to waste your time.
Three years ago, I attempted a 365 Project. About 90 days in, I had to accept the fact that I wasn’t going to make it to 365 days, so I turned it into a 100 Day Project. I know that a 365 Project sounds pretty simple -- take and post one photograph each day. My standards for the images I post on my social media are very high, but in the end, I had to accept the reality that I wasn’t going to strike gold each day. I really did try though.
Lake Superior features one of the harshest winter climates found in the United States. Despite temperatures as low as -32°F at times, photographer Bugsy Sailor visited the shoreline every day in 2019 to shoot the sunrise for his project Year of the Sunrise.
At the turn of the millennium, veteran photojournalist David Hume Kennerly embarked on a project using a single camera outfitted with a single lens – a medium format Mamiya 7II with a 43mm f/4.5 lens. As he crisscrossed the country, he committed to taking a photo each day, which culminated in his book Photo du Jour.
Well, that’s one month in the books for my 365 project. There were some days where the ideas came easy and some nights filled with tears. (Okay not that dramatic.) According to Lightroom, I took 1244 photographs this month.
The hardest part of a 365 project is the first week. Actually, maybe it’s the first two-three weeks. It’s the period between introducing something new into your life and then making that thing a habit.
"365 Days of Photos," "One Photo a Day," "One Shot, One Day," "365 Challenge" – Do these sound familiar to you? Have you ever wanted to take at least one photo a day, every day... and I mean Every. Single. Day?
365 projects. It seems that most photographers attempt one at least once. It’s a massive commitment, but you can make it easier on yourself and get a lot out of it if you approach it the right way.
At the end of 2014 I made the decision to dedicate 2015 to completing one of these projects.
Self-taught Canadian photographer Elizabeth Gadd described her photography niche better, perhaps, than anybody else when she said, "I, uh… shoot landscapey stuff… with people in them."
That, however, is something of an understatement. The 21-year-old photographer's body of work does, indeed contain "landscapey stuff with people in them," but that hardly does the spectacular vistas she photographs justice.
What's the best thing about a 365 project? Some would say it's that you develop the habit of shooting every single day. Others that you develop your skill because you're shooting more than you probably ever have. But for photographer Aliza Razell, the best thing about a 365 project is the ability to experiment.
And it's experimentation that led her to create the stunning images you see above and below. Images that combine watercolor and photography into something greater than the sum of its parts. Images that, as you probably already guessed, are spreading like wildfire.
Human photographers aren't the only ones dragging their cameras to every corner of the globe in search of the decisive moment. As it turns out, a little LEGO man spent a year doing the same thing as part of life-sized human photographer Andrew Whyte's fun 'The Legographer' series.
Just over a year ago, photography was my most precious hobby. I really enjoyed it and took photos fairly often, but I felt that if I wanted to take this thing to the next level, I had to do something extraordinary. A couple of days before New Year's Eve I decided to start a "365 days 365 photos" project like so many other photographers before me. It felt like a great idea, and so I just went for it. What could possibly happen?
For 20 years, 52-year-old photojournalist Mark Hirsch drove by the lonely old Bur Oak two miles from his home in southwest Wisconsin without thinking to take its picture even once. Then, one evening, he took a particularly beautiful photo of the tree at sunset using his newly purchased iPhone.
It was just his way of testing out the phone's camera (which he was very skeptical of) and, lo and behold, he was hooked. For a full year after that, starting on March 23, 2012, Hirsch took one photo per day of the towering Bur Oak, and he's titled the resulting project "That Tree."
One Lighthouse, 365 Clicks is a fascinating photo series by Brazilian photographer Tunisio Alves Filho. Like all 365 projects, he took one photo per day over the course of a year. Unlike most 365 projects, he never changed subjects, just vantage point, composition and style -- needless to say, he had to get pretty creative.
For a long time, photographer Travis Lawton had been toying with two ideas: shooting film for the first time since he was 6 years old, and doing a 365 project where he shot something every day for a year. Instead of choosing one, he decided to mix the two desires into a project he felt he could realistically keep up with for an entire year; that's how he came up with Project OneRollFifty2.
Director Cesar Kuriyama received a good bit of attention on the Internet last year for capturing 1 second of video on each day of his 30th year of life, and then turning the snippets into a beautiful recap of his year. The video premiered during a TED talk Kuriyama gave in March. That talk has just been published by TED, and can be seen above.
We've been seeing more and more of this concept lately, but this one is still nicely done: Springfield, Missouri-based photographer Kent Frost created this 6.5-minute recap of his life in 2012 using one second of footage recorded each day. It's titled, "Just a Second."
This creative stop-motion video was created over the course of one year by a boy named Kristen (unbeatableme on YouTube). He took at least one photograph every day for 365 days showing himself standing in front of a whiteboard. By changing elements inside the shot (e.g. his clothing, the art on the whiteboard, his hair), Kristen made one of the most "time-consuming" animation projects we've seen.
Last October, Portland-based 17-year-old photographer Brendon Burton began an ambitious project in which he committed to creating one self-portrait every day for a year. Now, half a year later, Burton is still going strong and his Flickr photostream is full of beautiful and creative images that document his development as a photographer.
Cesar Kuriyama spent a couple years saving enough money to take an entire …
A young woman living in Los Angeles named Madeline did a 365 day …