Tuesday 25 May 2010

The 200 Mark (The #365 Project)

As you may know, I embarked on Seasons of Glass, a project a little while ago to shoot and post a picture a day for year. That project has now reached its 200 mark, and I figured 200 would be a good number to write up a first summary.


I should start out that while overall I'm very happy with the results I achieved so far, and with the quality of the photos I managed to take, there were days when I felt like canceling the project - where I thought that the project, in the end, was more about quantity than quality. Fortunately, 'though, these days were rather rare. Overall, pulling the project through has kept me on my toes. It made me look for possible subjects everywhere and at every hour, challenged me to find things I normally would not have photographed and also made me take detours and discover new areas and aspects of Berlin. Overall, the project is a mixture of several things: a documentary of sorts about the places I see (and thus, to a large degree, it is about Berlin) as well as the things that I do. It is also an exploration of taking photos with the iPhone and the possibilities of editing these, or even using them to create collages, multiple exposures and drawings. In the end, 'though, the driving force has always been to find one picture that not only was worth being put up and shown to the public, but one that was maybe better than all the ones before (sometimes that also meant putting up not one picture but a small set of images).


Looking at the tags that have now assembled over 200 days, it is not surprising that Berlin is up there at the top of the list; and following it the two topics which have been the focus of my photography for the past ten years: urban and people. Seeing how long the winter was this year, it's also not surprising to see that tag way up at the top. Another tag, Little Things, is a bit more surprising: it's the expression I use to denote photos of small objects (statues, flowers, anything) I find around the flat, the hotel rooms, on the sidewalk. The kind of things I normally would not have bothered to shoot. Other tags, like toonpaint, doubleX and collage, reflect some of the techniques I apply using various iPhone apps.


The rest of the tags pretty much gives a nice summary of what my life was like the last 200 days: two trips to India, the daily grind of taking subways and trains, life in Neukoelln...


There are 165 more days to come: summer is waiting in the aisles and hopefully a couple more trips are coming up before the end of the Seasons of Glass. I hope to have fun with the remaining shoots, and I hope you'll enjoy it as well.