Social Immersion Challenge

I found it ironic that one of this week’s assignments could be to try a 365-day photo challenge.  I first read about these over the December break and decided that as an amateur photographer, I was going to attempt one myself.  The goal for me was to capture a highlight of my day so that I could see first hand all that was good in my life.  My intentions lasted about four days; not that I do not have all sorts of positives going for me but I started to miss days because I was either busy, or just plain forgot.  Of course, once I skipped a day, I felt I completely invalidated the project.  To take a picture and backdate it seemed liked cheating to me. 

When I read about this assignment, I was excited to think that since I had to do it, I would.  However, it was only Day 3 and already I was struggling.  The first day was to decide on a site to use (I chose 356Project), then figure out how to link it to my blog, and finally, using the theme of last week’s projects to use cell phones only, how to get what I captured on my phone to upload properly.  Each step had its own set backs, and though ultimately I figured it all out, it still took a fair amount of time, which reminded me why I don’t always follow through with exploring a web tool I had been curious about: unless I needed it immediately, it could wait until I had “free time.”   Days two and three put me at school until late (meetings & parent teacher conferences), and I found myself struggling to take a photo and then make sure it loaded properly to 365Project – I found out that pictures might be sent to the site (for the most part), but you have to log back in to accept them into your project.  Eventually I got the hang of the entire process, and found that I became more disciplined as the week went on.

To save my sanity, I decided my subjects would be my dogs as opposed to trying to come up with some extraordinary topic and then worrying that my pictures weren’t actually capturing what I was trying for.  If I were to take on a true 365-day challenge, I would select a deeper topic, one that I could develop more as the days went on.  Overall, I think this type of project is a great idea, and I would like to use this at the start of my classes with my freshman and senior media students, so that they can document their most important semesters in their high school career.