Hi everybody,
Before I start writing anything, here’s a description of this challenge, so you know what I’m talking about:
First of all – why this challenge? Well, I’ve been using my DSLR camera for about 1 year and my routine was the same. If I don’t feel like taking any photos today, I just won’t take any photos. It could happen that I don’t take a single photo for the whole week. On the other side, if I have a “photo-session”, I’m walking or driving around until I find something that would be considered as a “nice photo” and that should be good enough to publish on Instagram or 500px. And lately, I noticed that I’m running out of ideas what to photograph here in Belgrade. So I needed some refreshment, some “guideline” what to shoot.
But most of all, I needed something that will force me to take at least one photo per day and something that will force me out of my comfort zone. It is not hard to take a great photo of a beautiful sunset or of a funny looking animal or of a colorful landscape. The hard part is to get a predefined topic and to have 24 hours to think of something and to create a photograph from it. And as if that wasn’t hard enough, you have to do it simultaneously with all of the other daily tasks and obligations. Work, training, language lessons, house chores, eating, sleeping… There’s not much time left, it’s almost impossible to go out with a camera and to spend hours looking for that perfect scene. You have to improvise, you have to use your mobile phone camera, you have to deal with far-from-perfect conditions. Indoor photography, poor light, bad weather, you name it.
That’s the main reason why I wanted to start with this challenge. I wanted to put myself in a situation where I would give everything to have my DSLR with me, but the only thing I do have is a mobile phone. I wanted to be forced to take a photo of clouds on a day when the sky is clear. I needed somebody to tell me that I have to take a selfie, and everyone knows that I hate being photographed.
So, in the next 30 posts I will try to tell 30 stories about my struggle to complete this challenge. You will be able to see 30 photos, some of which will be awful. But I hope that eventually this process will make me a better photographer and that I will become able to see more hidden things and potentially beautiful photo catches in the world around me.
Keep reading, Day 1 is coming in the next post.
See ya soon 🙂
Vladimir Tomić Photography 