At the beginning of 2019, I decided that I wanted to challenge myself. I wanted to make myself enjoy not only taking pictures again, but also enjoy editing them and pushing away all of the previous self-deprecating critiques that I would never say about someone else’s work. So, I decided to make myself join the 365 Challenge.
For those of you unfamiliar, the 365 Challenge is not actually any event you have to officially register for or anything. It’s a goal that you can set in place for yourself. For my photography, my goal was to take and edit one photograph that I genuinely “whole-assed” and post it every day.
It didn’t work.
That said, I did wind up figuring out how to not hate myself and my work anymore. I realized that I do have a style and I do have favorite subjects. I learned to force myself to be open to criticism every day (more or less. For a bit.) on work I really cared about, and you know what?
I only got positive feedback.
Suddenly, my only critic was not me. Suddenly, my photography belonged to the world at large, and they actually liked it.
I wound up getting crazy busy (all good things) and couldn’t keep up with it, but I’m so glad that I did do what I did. Whatever your personal craft (photography, baking, carpentry…) I highly recommend that you participate in one of these “challenges”.
Here is a selection of photos I took for the challenge plus a few extras that didn’t quite make the Instagram cut:
