Photography 365

This week was a week when I was bogged down by my RLW (real life work) and at the same time had an assignment due in college,  a business plan for an imaginary photo business that I might start in the future… well, here’s to dreaming, I guess… Under pressure, a lot of my more serious photography falls by the wayside. I find it hard to concentrate on two things at the same time, i.e. analyse the photography market in Ireland and at the same time produce stunning canteen shots… Plus, I almost feel guilty about going out and shooting while I should be sitting at home, writing up serious numbers. Because shooting is just too much fun – it doesn’t even feel like work… And sure, work is something that needs to hurt??? (Like writing a business plan…)

The only thing I was able to keep up was the 365 project. It’s a total win-win: I get to shoot photos and that way satisfy my need to be creative. But I don’t have to feel guilty about putting too much effort into it because they are all shot on the iPhone *hahaha*. Now, I can’t really claim that project for my own. I got into it thanks to my friend A___ who started his “an iPhone pic a day” exactly on the 1st of January. I only followed suit on the 1st of February, but have been good at keeping it up since then.

The project is exactly what it says on the tin: 365 pictures in one year, i.e. one picture a day. It’s hardly an original concept. Little schemes like this have been amusing photographers for years. But with the advancement of technology it has become so much easier to take part in such projects without much effort.

After A___ had told me about the idea, I did what I do best: I trailed the internet for an app that makes taking part in a personal 365 project easier. I wanted four things from this project:

• shooting with iPhone, i.e. quick point and shoot photo fun without too much thinking
• storing on net so as to not clog up my iPhone memory and is also possible to share with friends
• no hassle picture upload straight from the phone rather than via the PC
• and easy month-by-month overview of the images shot so far.

Oh hello – and I wanted it to be FREE. *ggg*

Confusingly, there are two very similarly named services available at the moment. A___ had recommended  365project. I had a quick look and nearly signed up for it when I realized that this does not actually support any upload straight from the iPhone. Essentially this is a service for *any* 365 project, whatever piece of equipment you shoot it on. Thus, once you have shot your picture of the day, you must import it to you computer and then you can upload it to the 365project website.

This may all be fine if you are trying to shoot a prefect image every time. Truth is: I am not. I am specifically looking for a 365 project that is geared towards iPhone images only. Which in turn means, I am not going to play with post-production. And if I am not interested in post-production, then I certainly will find importing via PC a detour. All I need is an iPhone app, actually!

But a bit of a research online and I struck lucky. iphoneproject365 does exactly what I want it to do: You download the app onto your iPhone. The app then lets you either take a picture right there and then by tapping the appropriate icon, or you can import an image from your iPhone photo library. Another tap on the inverted commas in the bottom left corner lets you comment on your image, write a caption or describe what is in your image. Then you tap on the upload arrow and within a few seconds the image will be uploaded into your very own 1-pic-a-day site. This both appears in your app and online. And this is what it looks like:

You get a monthly overview over all the images you have taken. They appear, as you can see, as square thumbnails. If you want to, you can actually crop your images to be squares – or you can just upload them as is. Navigation is via a couple of arrows (which I have cropped out of this image *duh*), so you can easily jump back and forth between the individual months. A click on a day will bring up the image in bigger format.

This little calendar overview is public, i.e. you can let your friends know your handle and they can surf to your calendar pages and check your daily progress. You can find me, for instance, at http://www.iphoneproject365.com/photos/SonjaShoots . However, there is one drawback to the app – there is no easy sharing. Social Media integration is still missing, i.e. the ubiquitous Facebook thumb or a simple little “share this” with options to send the link to twitter, stumbleupon, posterous, pinterest, Facebook, whatever… In fact, you can’t even properly copy the URL manually because there is only a image location link on the actual thumbnail – and that is too tiny to be meaningful for sharing. On the other hand, that is a very thoughtful copyright- defending policy. After all we are photographers and we do stand over the rights to our own images. And integrating other people’s images via URL would constitute copyright breaches.

In any case – iPhoneproject365 is a fun little app that will facilitate a bit of photo fun every day. It is free and easy to use, it will let you set an automatic reminder to shoot your image and it lets you upload your own images quick and easy. Over time you could easily check your progress as a photographer or find other uses for this handy little documentary tool. And if we are all lucky, the developer will keep working on this and eventually spoil us with Social Media integration.