On the 2nd of January 2009, being freshly paid for a freelance project, I wandered down to my local branch of LCE to see what they had on offer. Lucky for me they had just the camera I wanted, a Canon 450D with the 18-55 kit lens, I also managed to get them to throw in a Canon 430ex Speedlite for a very reasonable price. It wasn’t until this day that it crossed my mind to do a 365 project. I thought it would be a great way to keep the camera in my hand & speed up the learning process. Conveniently I had been taking some photos the day before on my FX-30, meaning I could run my 365 from January 1st to December 31st (It just felt right).

I instantly fell in love with my new 450D, she went every where with me & it didn’t take me long to start picking up extra bits for her, like the Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens & grip. Around February I found myself getting a hunger for a film camera, I got a 35mm Fisheye Lomo for my birthday & on the 20th of February I picked up a 1983 Canon AE-1 from a camera stall at a local market. Shooting film is fantastic, I realised how much it makes you value each photo. I think I soon translated that, at least to some degree, to my digital photography.

It also didn’t take me long to get interested in off camera flash, aka Strobist photography. I’m a bit of a control freak, so being able to set up all the light in a scene really appealed to me. But holy shit, that stuffs confusing for a n00b! Seriously, I spent hours & hours reading EVERYTHING I could find on the internet trying to make sense of any of it. There is certainly a lot more information about it on the web now than there was 10 months ago. The first product to aid my strobist adventure was the Canon ST-E2, which is an infrared transmitter capable of firing any of the current range of Canon speedlites while retaining the ETTL system. I quickly found that the ST-E2 (That name just rolls off the tongue) was quite limiting, being infrared it relies on line-of-sight & it doesn’t have a huge amount of range.

So I did some more research & got some radio transmitters, these gave me range but meant that I had to run any flashes on manual. That was ok, at this point I was already making sure I was taking every photo with my camera on full manual. Manual equals control, Rick likes that, in fact now when I use my ST-ET I use the flash on manual just to get that extra level of control. Light stands & light modifiers were the next logical step for me, umbrellas made the most sense as they were easy to get hold of & affordable. Since then I’ve had quite a few different umbrellas but recently I picked up some pretty large umbrella boxes which I really love. They like a softbox, but in umbrella form — awesome.

At the beginning of June an old family friend, who just happens to be a photographer, invited me out to a studio shoot he was doing. He also said that if brought someone pretty there would be time to set up the studio lights & shoot them. I knew just the person, my friend Leah, she’d done some modelling in past & one of her friends is a make up artist. They both came along & we had a really great time. I learnt loads & got some nice shots. It really whet my appetite for portrait photography – who would have thought, someone as antisocial as me would love taking photos of people as much as I do.

I never really intended to shoot live music, the thought hadn’t even entered my mind, until my friend Sarge rang me about Groomfest (An annual Lincoln music festival). He was quite insistent that I would shoot it… & you don’t say no to Sarge. It was a two day event at a local pub, a big marquee was set up in the car park with a stage. Some 25 bands performed – I shot them all. For my first time shooting music I was pretty happy with myself, or as happy as I get, I actually really enjoyed it & since have shot quite a lot of music locally.

About two thirds of the way through the year things started to become very hard work so I tried to give the project more structure by mixing in smaller projects, the first of which was Project 50 which I did with one of my bimbo gal pals we even made a website after we completed it – Fifty Of Fifty. I also did a week of self portraits. Which was harder work than you might think, not only was it a challenge to set the camera up, with lighting, focus etc… but it was also a challenge for me to step to the other side of the lens, I wasn’t the biggest fan of having my photo taken but now I’m pretty ok with it.

I also started a non time line based set which I am calling “Quotos“. I love photography & I love typography combining the two made a lot of sense. I was planing on doing a Quoto for my final photo, but it didn’t work out. A set I will be continuing to expand, at a steady rate, for the foreseeable future.

In October I made the decision to swap my Canon 450D to a prosumer level Canon 50D. Don’t get me wrong the 450D is a great camera & I would recommend it to anyone getting into photography but I felt I would benefit from the upgrade. The 50D has a much better sensor, handles low light better, bla bla bla the list goes on & I am really happy with it, well until I can get my hands on a 5D MkII.

The whole project has been incredibly hard work, motivation has probably been my biggest enemy in this. It is so hard to take a consistantly good photo day after day, it’s even harder to come up with that photo. My 2nd has been time – when I am busy with work, or have other things on it’s amazing how quickly the day can escape you. Sometimes I ended up with a slightly sub par photo, but I still somehow managed to hit that shutter button every day.

So over all I am very happy I’ve done the project but it’s no secret that I’ve got pretty sick of it. I have learnt a huge amount over the year, I think you can see that if you look over photos as a whole. The question is where do I go from here? What frequency will I be producing photos now that I’m not forced/required/committed to doing one daily? Honestly – I have no idea, all I can tell you is that I am in love with photography & I have more projects planned for myself. But from now I will be taking on non-time-based photography projects for example – I will be carrying on my Quotos & I also plan to start a project called 50 Strangers. So I might have a break for a little while, but keep your eyes on my flickr because it doesn’t end here.

This is also my first post as part of Project52, so I will be trying to do 1 blog post a week for the whole of 2010… yes I know I’m a sucka!

If you want to keep up with my photos & my bloggings I’d thoroughly suggest following me on twitter.