Published!

Alright, let the title not fool you too much into thinking I've achieved something remarkably great, but one of the PAD photos was picked up by NowPublic for inclusion in the gallery attached to one of its online articles. The author of the article contacted me via Flickr and requested permission to use the photograph, which is really nice.

So, for the first time in 4 years someone's found one of my photographs interesting enough. This gives me a fillip to push more of my photographs online and organize and "market" them more effectively.

The photo in question is The pile-up and it shows up in the gallery attached to this article.

This is a direct link to the photo on NowPublic.

A new beginning

All done. I want to thank all of you who have taken the time to comment and critique the pictures and encouraged me along the way.

APAD 2008 was great. I'm not going to be continuing it in 2009, just as I had thought at the beginning of 2008. It was planned as a one-year exercise, and so shall it be.

It's going to be a very different year. For starters, I can already sense that days - at least the initial 30 or 45-odd ones - are going to get much longer, more relaxed. It'll be a bit strange to go to bed without having taken a picture for the day.

The primary reason I took up this project for 2008 was to inject a shot of creativity into my photography. 2007 was a bad year for me in terms of photographic output. I had a few golden opportunities in 2007 to take some really nice photographs but I could feel that the output was just not up to snuff. Ideally one's most recent work should be his/her best, as Martin Bailey says, and I knew 2005 and 2006 were probably better and more importantly, more consistent, than 2007. I wanted to change that in 2008, and hence, the APAD project.

Did I achieve my goals? Yes and no. Let me elaborate.

The successes or positives first. Upon going through the archive I find quite a few photographs that are print-worthy. That is good. I have at least a few that are worth printing and even framing. The exercise has been good that way. I have also gotten a better handle on the gear that I have in terms of how it behaves under specific situations. That's not to say I was bad on this count before, but my sense of "knowing" the gear has become better. This is very helpful in tricky situations where the window of opportunity to get a shot is very small.

I have learnt a lot more about the direction I should in the future. I have developed an interest in project-oriented photography, where one takes a few (15 to 20) images on a theme or story, and I am keen to explore this style of now on a variety of subjects.

I have identified things to improve upon. In my mind this is the biggest return on the investment I have made in time and effort on this project. I will talk about these things as I write about the negatives below.

Finally, and most importantly, I am still as much, if not more, in love with photography as I was when I first took it up as a serious hobby. 2007 was an aberration, but not one that was caused by a lack of interest in the art and craft of photography.

A good photograph must tell a story. It is very important to have compelling subject(s) arranged in the most aesthetically pleasing manner and shown in the best possible light, but the story is paramount. I believe I have not managed to tell compelling stories through a vast majority of my photographs. There have been a few instances where I've managed a humorous or thoughtful take on mundane objects (and there are many of those considering I've mostly only shot stuff in my home), but I should have done more.

There is no substitute for a great subject. There is no substitute for wonderful light. Above all, there is no substitute for a story if a photograph is to merit a second, third, fourth and thousandth look. I've failed on most of these counts. While I have learnt lessons along the way, I have unfortunately not been able to apply them on the go.

One of the fundamental mistakes I've made at times (and this shows up in the corresponding photographs) is to treat the day's PAD exercise as a ritual or formality, as something to be done and dusted with. That doesn't work. Meticulous planning is just as important as being agile to capture a fleeting moment. The side effect of my approach on such occasions has been horrible light (usually from the fluorescent/incandescent bulbs at home). Double whammy.

The other thing that probably worked against my favour was my self-imposed restriction that each photo should be "different". Different in terms of what? Subject matter? Composition? Meaning? Many of the 366 images are repeats of others in all of these senses. I am not going to list examples here but they are easy to find. Not only did I fail in sticking to this self-imposed restriction, but I have also missed a few opportunities along the way, needlessly in hindsight. This also ties in well with my idea of exploring theme-based projects.

Finally, I just need to go out more. And when I do go out I must leave my hindrances behind and be ready to take photographs in a variety of situations without really thinking about what others might think of me. I have gotten a few pictures on my daily commute or when I was travelling by train, but they have all been in the comfort of relative privacy. Good stuff to photograph just does not materialize in front of you in your private confines.

So overall, what would I call my effort? I look at it as a success because of all the positives and because of what I have learnt and identified courtesy of the negatives. Are the results even a patch on projects like this or this or tons of other great collections out there? No. That doesn't mean, however, that my efforts were in vain.

I'll wrap this up with a few thoughts on what I want to do in 2009 and beyond. I'm obviously not continuing the PAD in 2009. I may some year in the future, but I don't know which. However, I have identified two concrete things that I want to work on in 2009. Both are more technically oriented - photographic workflow and post-processing technique. I won't go so far as making resolutions, but I intend to make significant improvements on both fronts by the end of this year.

The thing with photography, as with anything else in life, is that the learning never stops. Under constraints imposed by time (mainly), one can only prioritize a few things over others, and workflow and post-processing technique are what I'm going to focus more of my attention on this year compared to other technical aspects.

I will keep updating this blog with the odd post once in a while, so please keep it in your list of bookmarks or feeds. One of the things I plan to do in the very near future is to compile a set of those pictures from this PAD that I think are the best of the lot. I don't know how many I should put in there. 10? 20? Definitely not more than 20, I think. Do I even have that many, is the more pertinent question.

Once again, thank you all very much for reading this photo-blog and making it a part, however small, of your lives. It means a lot to me.

(Photo taken at Vizag a few minutes after sunrise on New Year's Day, 2009.)