Once Again Into the Year With Daily Photos

Sure a new year means all kinds of things (sans resolutions) for me it’s time to mark another year done at the Daily (but never everyday) Photo effort. Thus 2023 makes it the 16th year for this habit I do no want to shake.

To recast the story again, it goes back to the solo effort D’Arcy Norman did in 2007, nudging me to try in 2008, inviting others to do so via a flickr group. I’ve kept going at it since 2008, as has D’Arcy (tho in his own photo place) (and he is doing so again, maybe in 2023) (can I apply blog pressure through endless parentheticals?).

What? Another Do X A Day Project?

The 2022 Wrap

I took lots of photos in 2022, most every day a few, but somewhere in mid September I bogged down on the process of editing captioning posting to flickr. Why? Insert any theory … or as it is the thing to do, ask the Wisdom of Oracle-like ChatCPT:

Q: Why would someone who had completed a daily creative activity for 15 years have stopped doing so recently? What are theories for why people lapse in positive habits?

ChatGPT sez:

There could be many reasons why someone who had completed a daily creative activity for 15 years might have stopped recently. Some possible reasons could include changes in personal circumstances, loss of motivation or inspiration, increased workload or responsibilities, or simply losing the habit of doing the activity.

There are also a number of theories that attempt to explain why people might lapse in positive habits. One theory is that habits are formed through the process of classical conditioning, in which an automatic response is learned through repeated pairing with a stimulus. According to this theory, if the stimulus is no longer present or if the response is not reinforced, the habit may be broken.

Another theory is that habits are formed through the process of operant conditioning, in which an action is reinforced through the consequence that follows it. According to this theory, if the consequence is no longer reinforcing or if the action is not performed consistently, the habit may be broken.

It is also possible that lapses in positive habits may be due to a lack of motivation or a lack of self-control. In these cases, individuals may need to find ways to increase their motivation or build up their self-control in order to maintain their positive habits.

ChatGPT gibberish

What insight… as usual it starts with some relevance into the question but quickly steers into generalized pablum.

Regardless, it became a holiday task to catch up on this backlog. I am my own task maker here because I insist on writing titles, adding captions, tagging all photos. I have noticed a few colleagues which have been doing this a while doing the dump and upload method. ChatGPT can guess but it is a trivial chore.

But having info that I can use later to search photos is what makes this act of value to me. It is metadata as much as ISO and shutter speed and geolocation. Plus I believe in the potential of providing context for photos not just using it as a storage facility.

This is my way, I cannot criticize others.

After catching up on the backlog of my 2022/365 flickr album I usually go through to fill gaps, days I forgot to add to the album, or ones I named wrong in sequence. This year I spent less time doing this, which matters little as I am the only auditor.

As is for 2022 I scored 343 out of 365 days, no perfect, but a better batting average than 2021 (329 out of 365). Out of 15 years, only twice did I truly achieve a 100% score.

Again I assembled a year end review, making use of my friend and colleague John Johnston’s command line script to download photos, resize, and assemble them into a video (and yes I remember when John shared the now dead pummelvision site that previously did this). My version is slightly different to find photos from my album rather than tags, but it saves a lot of work in putting them all in a single video.

It’s my own obsessive habits that has me editing in iMovie to reverse the sequence, add titles, music, credits.

Finally, enough blog blabbering… the video!

Teeing Up for 2023

A good start is resetting the habit (pfffft to ChatGPT’s lame fallback to operant conditioning, I ain’t no lab mouse). Meaning Just Doing It. January 1 photos taken? Check. Edited? Check. Uploaded to Flickr? Check, into a brand new album and tag stream. Check.

Today? My slow blogging habit warms up, still lovely light for Cori and I to get out and snap some photos.

I also make a quick edit to the Flickr Group originally set up in 2008– change the name to 2023/365 Photos, pick new cover image and icons from members of the group (well over 1800), posting a short announcement.

It’s funny as these 1800 some people, vastly I have no idea who they are, occupy this space and have no real interaction beyond doing their photo thing in whatever way makes sense to them. It’s hardly a community, it’s more like strangers engaging in similar pursuit and never talking about it, just doing it.

I kind of think this is fascinating.

Want to jump in? The water is warm and safe, see https://www.flickr.com/groups/366photos/

Onward with One Step into 2023

Insert the disclaimer about hating / not making resolutions. Those sound like traps. I do this because the act of noticing interesting patterns/light and rendering them as photos always has worked for me as a creative act. Were it different I might make drawings, or music, or folded paper sculptures.

But I am noting the dispensing of my time/energy– I have slid some this year to the ease and nano-click rewards of posting to instagram , twitter, and now some to mastodon. I want to find again the priority first of getting my photos to the archive, place that matters and I control… no, it’s not flickr, but my own database in Aperture and hard-drives. Everything online is exhaust from that, but it should be flickr first, then others.

Daily photo habit for 2023 now reset, but it’s on me to follow through. And whether I do 1 or 365 matters not.

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Featured Image: Composite of my first and last daily photos of 2022: 2022/365/1 The Sun Star flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) and 2022/365/365 Caf-Magic flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)