“Golf is a good walk spoiled.”
– Mark Twain
Truth be told, this challenge didn’t really impact me in any profound way.
While it was nice to improve my golf game, taking a picture every day was little more than a waste of time.
I remember reading a story about a man who stopped using the Internet for one year. He thought doing so would drastically change his life, It didn’t. He still went to the same job, lived in the same city, dated the same girl, and had the same friends. Aside from missing some entertaining memes and YouTube videos, his life wasn’t too different from what it had been before.
When I decided to photograph one event per day, I wasn’t changing anything. I was just capturing my routines and normal activities. When I was doing cool things I didn’t have time to photograph them anyway. It’s pretty hard to take a picture while you’re racing downhill on a mountain bike or caught up in the moment at a private concert. What I ended up with were pretty generic pictures of uninteresting things, trees that I meditate under and forgotten back roads that I hike on.
My biggest problem with the challenge is simply the fact that I’m not sentimental. I don’t wax nostalgic about “the good old days,” I really don’t have a favorite memory, and I’m perfectly fine with change and progress. If my favorite thinking tree gets cut down I’ll find another, if the the places I walk get turned into parking lots I’ll make a new walking path. Things change, I’m fine with that.
P.S. Despite several attempts, I couldn’t convince any girls to let me take “art nude” photographs of them. My future as an artist has been ruined.