fifty-two

On Saturday, I took the fifty-second and final image in a year-long project I've been trying to complete for almost as long as I've been into photography as a hobby. And by "almost as long", I mean I took the first photo for my first attempt two weeks after I took the shot that got me into photography. I've failed at it five times in seven years, usually at either week three or week ten. But in May last year, I made an agreement with myself that I was going to try again, and I was going to get the damned thing done this time. And I did. 

Now that it's done, I have complicated feelings about it, in no small part because it's a self-portrait project and since I first attempted it in 2008, self-portraits have morphed into "selfies" and are an easy shorthand for vapidity and self-absorption. I have several thoughts on this, but we'll get to that another time. It's not made me feel ashamed of doing this, though it has made me extremely reticent about sharing or celebrating it. I've also finished this project at a time when my self-esteem is somewhat wonky, and my sense of achievement has been overshadowed somewhat by a little voice saying one photo a week? Really? How is that anything to be proud of? Anyone could take one photo a week. You didn't even put any effort into half those shots. No wonder you don't want to share it. 

I'm writing this post in part to say, shut up, voice. It's not about how difficult it is to take a photo, it's about keeping something up for a whole year. It's about completing something I failed at multiple times before this one. It's about getting back into something I used to love after taking no photos for a year and a half. It's also about learning things, and here, for you the lovely reader, are some of the things I've learnt (for reference purposes, here is my completed album. I was going to post individual photos and talk about them, but then I'd have a big unwieldy post full of pictures of my face, and I don't want that. So have a look if you like, or make up photos in your own mind). 

Firstly, the voice is right about one thing; I didn't put any effort into quite a few of those shots. "Crap, it's Sunday night and I don't have a picture yet" was the motivator behind at least a quarter of them. In practice, though, "no effort" doesn't mean "worthless". Out of the dozen last-minute Sunday night shots that I remember being last-minute Sunday night shots, I dislike three of them, and two of them I dislike because I think they could have been good (one was taken in shitty lighting and the other showcases my shitty Photoshopping). Even the one I just thought was shitty got a compliment from a friend who said he liked it. My least favourite shots are the ones I took for other reasons and wasn't planning to use for the project. #27 (the T-shirt) and #49 (the dress which I MADE) are photos I already had on my camera and used instead of taking a last-minute Sunday night shot, and I dislike them both. Lesson: take the last-minute no-effort shot anyway. 

Shot #6 (of my hair) should have been consigned to the "repurposed photos I dislike" pile, but it's actually one of my favourites. I cropped the original photo, of me dressed up as a really half-assed ladybird for a club night, down to about one-sixth of its size and edited the crap out of it. Lesson: editing is a powerful thing.

I took self-portraits in Nice, Florence and Brussels. I took them on multiple different forms of public transport. I took them at work, at dance events, in public bathrooms, down random streets in the City, in a tree in Cheltenham, by a castle in Southend. More than half of them, however, I took in my bedroom. I felt a bit bad about this at the time, but being able to do a bunch of different things with one (quite restrictive) environment is actually a really useful skill. I do, however, still wish I got better lighting in here. Lesson: work with what you have, but shitty lighting is not your friend.

Compositionally, my favourite images are #5 (on the sofa) and #22 (with the bruised knuckles), neither of which I liked that much at the time because I thought my face and/or hair looked bad. Lesson: staring at your own face to edit an image does weird things to your perception and it doesn't hurt to put them away for a while and come back later.

Three of the photos are accidents. #11 (the shadow), #24 (under the duvet) and #44 (the one taken upwards from waist height) were not the photos I was trying to take at the time, and I have absolutely no idea what I did to make #24 come out like that, but I really like all of them. Lesson: embrace mistakes.

When I look back at the whole set, my favourites - not necessarily from a photographic point of view, but the ones I most like to look at - are the ones that take me back to a specific memory or feeling from the last year. Moving house and having a room full of junk, various people painting flowers on my face or bruises on my knuckles, that time I spent New Year's Day on the beach in the sunshine in the south of France and everyone hated me... these are the things I'm most pleased to have photographic memories of. Lesson: get the camera out when interesting stuff happens.

Other things I learned, in no particular order:

I need an off-camera flash and a tripod.

Most photoshoots (which is a pretty grandiose word for what I was doing most of the time) are salvageable.

The smallest thing can serve as a good focal point.

Jumping shots are HAAAARD.

If you post a picture of your legs in stockings on Flickr, it will get several hundred views within the first twelve hours.

A blank background wall is a godsend.

When in doubt: hands and feet. 

I don't know how much I love any of these fifty-two photos from an artistic standpoint, but the project as a whole has done exactly what I wanted it to do; got me taking photos again, reminded me of why I love photography, and made me better at it. Self-portraits are difficult to separate from self-image and judge on merit alone, but my normal photography has got noticeably better, I think, since I've been doing the project. I've got used to having a camera in my hand, light makes more instinctive sense to me now, and I've stopped editing blue/orange washes on everything. Clear progress, and a worthwhile outcome. 

I don't want to get out of the habit of taking pictures now that the project's done. For the next month, I'm taking a photo a day; not of me, and not for sharing. Just a month's worth of "here's what happened in May" for my own amusement. After that I'd like to start another project. I'm considering a series of portraits, or going back to the photography technique documentation thing that I did when I first started, or something based around lighting and the off-camera flash that I am totally going to buy as soon as I have some spare cash. That's likely, right? Spare cash?