About a month ago, I started the 100x1 project. I have been capturing and sharing (at least) one photo every day, with the goal to do this for (at least) 100 days. The only reason I started this project is that I saw other people do similar things and found it cool. What I didn’t expect is how the reasons to start were soon replaced by entirely different reasons to keep going.
An unhealthy start
While I have been taking thousands of photos in the past years, I haven’t been sharing much of my photography outside of direct messages and gifted photo books. I have also been off most social media for quite some time. So it’s no surprise that I wasn’t used to the dopamine rush of people liking or commenting on my photos.
So for the first few days – actually, who am I kidding – for a solid two weeks, I was constantly refreshing all the places where I shared my photography in anticipation of any signal that a person has actually seen my work and engaged with it. There’s not need to go into why that is unhealthy and I’m happy to say that I managed to stop having that reflex after a while.
Surprising turns and discoveries
One relic from the aforementioned early days of the project is that I have switched to mostly square crops in my photos. I started doing this to have a cleaner grid on Glass and Instagram, but I quickly came to appreciate the format for its simplicity. With square photos, the aspect ratio becomes neutral and fades in the background, giving me one less decision to make when capturing a frame. I am enjoying this format more and more, and my camera is now permanently set to show a square crop in the viewfinder.
The second discovery goes deeper and has emerged once I started carrying a camera almost everywhere. I realized that I wasn’t comfortable taking photos in places that aren’t usually.
While I have no problem at all to step onto Munich’s tourist-filled central square with my camera, doing so in the more residential area where I live has been strangely difficult. And it’s not just about taking photos of people in those places: even just stopping to take my camera out and capture a photo of a flower felt (and still feels) odd in these areas.
I’m not sure where exactly that comes from, but noticing it has allowed me to actively work on it. I now make it a point to take my time when capturing a photo. This forces me to experience the awkward feeling for a longer time, and I am slowly starting to feel it dissolve. I’ve heard many people refer to photography as therapy and this is an unexpected way in which it does so for me.
Critical thoughts
I am thoroughly enjoying this project and it is clearly good for me in more ways than one. There is, however, one downside that I can’t leave unmentioned: Since I want to both capture and share a photo on the same day, I feel like I’m often not sharing my best work. Doing it this way has other benefits, like forcing me to not overthink things, but I’ve had multiple days where I would have preferred to share something from the past. Of course there is nothing stopping me in principle from doing that in addition to the photo of the day, except for my time and energy reserves.
Today is one of those days. The photo of today is below, and it is certainly not one that I would have published under different circumstances. However, I felt that my time would be better spent on writing this than publishing more photos. And that’s a trade-off I feel good about.
