Atthe beginning of the year I challenged myself to share more of the content that I was creating. I take a lot of photos, all of them on my iPhone, but I was rarely sharing them. I wanted to change that.
Sitting in Ground Support cafe drinking an iced coffee on New Year’s Day, @becky and I were discussing what we wanted to accomplish in 2016.
For me, one of the things that I wanted to do was share more of the great things we were seeing, places we were going, and experiences that we were having living in New York City.
The easiest format I found to do that was by choosing to share a photo, every single day, publicly on Instagram.
My motivation was primarily to share more, to catalogue with tags, research the items I was shooting, and to create memories of the things we saw, and the places we went.
New York City is packed with stories, full of hidden gems in plain sight, just waiting to be shared.
Why Instagram?
I’ve been an avid Instagram user since the very early days, I loved the square post format, and I loved the early constraints. Remember when you could only post photos taken from within the app itself? I believe that the team at Instagram have done a really fantastic job of staying true to a lot of their original values whilst evolving the product over the years.
The feature set has changed and expanded dramatically, but the pure focus on content first is still inspiring. I considered a few alternatives, but as a daily user, and someone who uses their phone as their primary camera, it made the most sense.
What went well:
- 97.3% completion rate, I missed 10 days for a couple of sound reasons.
- I took a lot more photos because of this, different types and styles, and I have a huge library of great photos that I hope to share more of one day.
- Shooting more photos is the one true way to improve your photography, I definitely noticed that personally.
- A couple of months in I started shooting a daily one second video as well (using One Second Everyday), these make for a different take on your life, and more so saving precious memories of our daughter growing up.
- I never really told anyone I was doing this, but many friends would often comment about enjoying seeing all of my photos. I also must thank them for their patience as I’d stop to take a quick snap on our walk to lunch. Worth noting, I shared all of my photos from Instagram to Facebook too.
- I made it to the end of the year! If you attempt to do this, my best advice that I kept repeating to myself over-and-over, “just take one more photo… and post it, tomorrow it will be easier”.
