Nov 012009
 

A photograph of a single autumn leaf on a twig above a blurred background of fallen leaves.

Color swatch yellow Color swatch green Color swatch brown [¹]

“Just show up!”, said Craig Tanner during a photography workshop last year. Sounds simple enough. Yet those three words have stayed with me ever since, because it’s not always easy and has many levels of meaning.

In another workshop two years ago, Freeman Patterson said he still makes it a point to photograph every single day—as a concert pianist will practice scales.

“Just show up” is my plan for the month of November: to photograph, process and post an image here, every day.

I hope you’ll join me and share your experience with daily photo projects in the comment section: tips, revelations, and links to your project sites are all welcome!

For inspiration, three links to other “daily” projects I’ve been following:

  • Andreas Manessinger—3 years and going strong
  • Ed-K—has posted an image to his site every day for five years!
  • SoFoBoMo (Solo Photo Book Month)—”A group event where a bunch of photographers all make solo photo books start to finish, in 31 days, at more or less the same time.”

Plus André Gallant, who is my inspiration for the “November” challenge with a series of some of the most beautiful photographs I have ever seen.

¹ Colors of the day extracted using ColorSuckr. Though the name is funky, it did a nice job on this image from within Firefox as an add-on.

  • Yellow R:210 G:182 B:96
  • Green R:124 G:128 B:94
  • Brown R:104 G:80 B:49

  10 Responses to ““Just Show Up””

  1. April – Congrats on stepping up to your challenge, I’m sure you will find this to be very rewarding. I need to make time for one of Craig and Marti’s workshops I think I need a kick start. Great shot, you did more than “just show up”

    Bill H.

  2. Hurrah join the club! Mine goes back to Jan 01 2006. 95% one a day but sometimes I cheat by skipping a day and posting from a day or two earlier.

    I love your work April. More of it is a good idea. Just show up.

  3. Awesome! Good luck with this. I’ve enjoyed seeing your work on TME, and I hope to see more here.

  4. Hey, that’s absolutely cool 🙂

    May I suggest some plugins , etc?

    First: you’ll really want to get a Google Account (unless you have one), in order to “burn your feed” with Feedburner. Basically that’s a service now owned by Google, that allows you to publish a feedburner RSS URL instead of the feed URL of your blog. People subscribe to the Feedburner URL, not to yours. The idea is, that Google is supposed to stay in business longer than your current blog.

    Who knows, you may be unsatisfied with your server, you may buy another domain, you may move the blog away from WordPress to something else, whatever, you’d simply have to change the source feed URL at Feedburner and all your subscribers would automatically follow. You may not need it, but just in case, things are much easier when you do it now. If you go with Feedburner, the WordPress plugin “FD Feedburner Plugin” is what I use.

    While you are at it, the Google account can be used for Google Analytics as well. This service allows you to track visitors. That’s how I found out about your blog, it was listed as a referrer. The plugins “Google Analytics for WordPress” and probably “Google Analytics Dashboard” are nice and I use them. I use not only Google Analytics, but the free version of StatCounter as well, “Official StatCounter Plugin” takes care of that.

    “Subscribe To Comments” is nice, because it allows your commentators to get further replies via email. That’s what made me give you those recommendations in the first place.

    “WordPress Backup (by BTE)” and “WordPress Database Backup” can send daily backups of your blog and database via email. I use send them to an extra Google GMail account. Just in case. Who knows.

    You probably want to see those cool avatars in front of comments. Get yourself a “Gravatar” at gravatar.com and use the “Filosofo Gravatars” plugin for WordPress.

    Markus Spring recommended some of these, I’ve used all of them for a while now and so far nothing bad has happened 🙂

  5. OK, I see my Gravatar, seems like that’s already done.

    Another thing: I just subscribed to your current feed, and I saw that you only publish an excerpt in the feed and that you don’t publish the image.

    Of course that’s a private decision, but my impression is, that it does not work well for people like me, who read sites via a feed reader. You don’t necessarily need the people to click through to see them in your statistics. Just use Feedburner, that gives you statistics of your subscribers. It’s not as good and detailed as what you get from visitors to your site, but on the other hand, from a communication POV, you rather like people to not click through and still read your content, than people not reading your content because clicking through is tedious. In fact I read every entry by people like Paul Butzi or Paul Lester, to name just a few, but I only click through when I feel there is a discussion going on or I want to comment anyway. The web is about ease of use and about reaching out towards your readers, instead of waiting for them to reach out towards you. If you want to change that, it’s on your admin page under “Settings / Reading”.

  6. Bill, Michael, and TJ—thank you so much for stopping by, your encouragement and well-wishes! What a treat it is to see comments on my very first post. 🙂

  7. Andreas, I’m blown away by the time you took to visit and post all those excellent suggestions, and very grateful! I wasn’t aware of any of these possibilities, and will definitely implement as quickly as I can.

    Thank you again!

  8. Hi April,

    Congratulations on your entrance to the world of blogging!! It is so wonderful to see you showing more of your beautiful work to the world.

    I’ve managed to let myself get too busy this year — your new beginning will inspire me to begin again!! Thank you for the inspiration. I truly love both images you’ve posted — so simple and so elegant.

  9. An April event each day? Be still my heart. This… this is a wunnerful Fall treat. Daily posting is like daily gym-going, exhausting, obsessive, enervating, stimulating, maturating, and… a RUSH!

    You have an astonishing talent to resonate with my imagination April… this will be a valuable month for you, but more selfishly…. for me.

    Thanks…

    Ted

  10. Marti, thank you so very much for visiting and your encouraging words. I know your schedule has been crazy busy teaching workshops–from which I and so many others benefit tremendously. When things settle down for you over the winter, it would be a delight to see your personal work again on “My View”! I keep checking…

    Ted, you have such a way with words (and images). Your description of daily posting makes me laugh, and I’ll hold that in mind — like a personal trainer alongside — on days when I really don’t feel like going to the “gym”. 🙂

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