Some years ago, I hit a bit of a slump — my job at the time was soul-sucking and sad, and getting up in the morning was just hard. I was very obviously not doing the kind of fulfilling and creative work that moves me, and I was working my way through to another path (one I eventually found and am still on, happily!). As I slogged through each day, I struggled with finding a way to bring that creative joy to my working life when it seemed so beyond my control.

Then I heard about the 365 photo challenge project, and ding! That was it. Carry my camera everywhere and take a photo every day. I gleefully jumped right in, and suddenly I had an entirely new reason for looking at the world. Yes, I still had to work that dull job, but I joyfully distracted myself with the constant search for the day’s photo. Waking up in the morning always promised at least one thing to look forward to, and having found the photo of the day helped me to go to bed satisfied of having accomplished something good. Two significant things happened: my creative spark was reignited and my portfolio grew exponentially.

Today, as we look forward to 2020, I have a new reason to embrace a 365 project — a brand new camera! My new Nikon Z6 is still shiny and slightly unfamiliar, so what better way to learn it than to use it every day? And I’ve also come out of a year full of work that sometimes got in the way of my personal creative vision, so a photo challenge helps put my eye back into the center of my work. At least for a few moments every day.

During the last challenge, I didn’t quite make it through the entire 365 days, mainly because it got very hard to find a new subject after eight or nine months. So I’ve set up my 2020 photo challenge project with a couple of guidelines to help me achieve success this time around — first, I’ve created a calendar of topics for each week of the coming new year, beginning this week, which gives us a “bonus” 53rd week instead of the typical 52. You can subscribe to this google calendar and get a reminder every Sunday morning of the week’s theme. I plan to use these words and phrases as inspiration for each week’s photo attempts, and I think it will be uniquely challenging to find seven different subjects or interpretations of the theme. That’s what I need — a specific goal for those days when I “can’t find anything to photograph.”

Second, I’m allowing myself to post my daily photos whenever I get a chance. Last go round I tried to post every day as a means of accountability, but sometimes the photos needed some editing or I simply ran out of time to squeeze anything else in. Often that meant I posted a photo I didn’t love, and while that’s really just fine and still meets the goal of the project, for me it didn’t feel like success. So this year I’m shooting for a post a day on Instagram, but I’m completely ok with uploading in batches once a week if that’s what time allows. The driving goal is merely to use that camera (or any camera, really) every single day, regardless of when those images get seen.

So who wants to join me? My calendar is free and public and simple to use. I’ll be posting @chrissydealphotography on Instagram and using the hashtags #2020photochallenge and #366photochallenge. Give me a quick follow and a comment please and I’ll follow you back!

Cheers and happy photographing!