Project 365: a personal project
Project 365 is a personal project where I challenged myself to photograph (or videograph) an image (or clip) every day for 365 days.
A challenge project
Importantly, project 365 is a creativity challenge project.
Clearly, it is not “easy” to be creative on every single day of the week/month/year. For 365 days straight!
And It is definitely not easy to consistently come up with a good photograph or video sequence on each day.
But this is also the point of the exercise: to create, anytime, any day, regardless of circumstances.
Update / progress to date
Overall, I am happy with many of the images thus far.
But the project is definitely creating a lot of extra work and challenges (but then I love challenges!).
For example, on certain days, I really struggle to come up with a single useful and sharable image. Maybe the light seemingly is not good (I shoot mostly natural light for this project), I don’t have time, or am just pre-occupied with other “stuff”. Or there’s something else going on. But I think it’s on those seemingly difficult / challenging days where we grow.
In the end, this like any other “exercise”, is a way to strengthen the creative muscles.
Examples of project 365 photographs and videos
Below are some examples of shots / videos from this personal project. For a full list of what I have posted thus far, see this link. You can also follow a dedicated Instagram account siggphotography365 and also follow me on my main Instagram account.
Lake Superior Photography
This is one of my many shots from the Lake Superior North Shore where I tend to spend a lot of time throughout the year. This was shot before sunrise, very early in the morning. This happened to be day 68. It was very cold that morning; and icy. I was wearing crampons, and several layers of clothing.
This was another recent shot and made my picture of the day, this one was Day 78. I love doing portraits, and particularly enjoyed doing a portrait outside during a recent snowfall in Saint Paul. This is all natural light, and I loved the softness of light.
Snowfall
The snowfall was getting more intense, and we spontaneously decided to extend the portrait session into a video session to capture the snowfall and hopefully capture the mood of that particular afternoon.
Another day at the North Shore
This was just another day at the North Shore. It was overcast, and rainy, and generally not inspiring and I was definitely worried about not getting a good shot that day. So I decided to do another short film and used my video camera and Gimbal (stabilizer) to capture this footage. First I was going to go to spot on the shore, but as can be seen in the footage, the path was completely flooded, so I had to turn around. This was about half an hour before sunset. After sunset, I captured some footage of crashing waves. I ended up calling the short film just that: another day at the North Shore. And ended up being happy with the result in spite of the initial struggles.
This was a rare selfie in which I set up the camera, and took a series of images. I wanted to bring a little bit of perspective / scale to the image, and hope the person in the image does accomplish that. Another blue hour shot and the clouds were fantastic that morning.
North Shore Prints
A great side-effect of me shooting daily aside from my client work and other personal work is that I have created a new body of landscape work. As I have always been passionate about landscape photography, I decided to create an online ecommerce site to offer my landscape prints for sale: it is called North Shore Prints and you can check it out here: northshoreprints.com
This was shot in my studio and I was using a lens to create some interest with focusing in on the windows. This shot is probably also a good example of my focus on color grading images, in other words, using color modification creatively and to effect. Color grading is important for product shots, to achieve or represent accurate product colors, but in this case, I did deviate from the original color scheme and graded the image differently for creative effect. The style of this particular grade is called teal-orange, and is a look that I personally love and have used quite a bit for my personal work.
FUJI COLORS
Here some more examples of my recent landscape shots (all taken as part of project 365). All these images have been shot with a Fuji camera. While I use a Nikon camera for most of my commercial product work, I have been using a Fuji XT-3 almost exclusively for my landscape, portrait and video work. I absolutely love using this camera, for both video and stills. It is light, and with lenses substantially lighter to schlepp across town or various landscapes.
Some of these images have not made the image of the day, but made it into my landscape North Shore Prints store collection.
DANIEL SIGG
daniel@siggphotography.com
651-955-6502
Studio 316 is located in the historic Dow Artist Building.
I am a photographer in the Minneapolis, St Paul area who specializes in people, product, and food photography for advertising, business, and corporate clients. I am equally comfortable shooting in my studio as on location, and always strive to deliver more than expected.
I look forward to discussing your next project with you. Contact me here.