Owens Valley near Mammoth, California. May 28, 2005. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved..

It occurs to me that many people are probably aware that I post a new photograph every day — but that few know how long I’ve been doing this nor my reasons for this seemingly obsessive task. Today I’m sharing a bit of the back story.

I’ve been building and operating websites since about 1995.  I’ll skip over a bunch of other interesting (to me) steps in the previous millennium and my first adventures with weblogs (now known as “blogs”) in the 1990s — though this could be a story for another day. Early on I created a blog about backpacking and other outdoor subjects called “Dan’s Outside,” and it gradually came to hold more and more photographs. At some point — likely around the time I acquired my first DSLR in the early 2000s — the photographs began to be the primary focus, and in 2005 I created a photography blog. The photograph at the top of this post was one of the earliest I shared, back in July of 2005.

Although I have not kept careful records, it looks like the daily photograph posts probably began to appear about a month later in August 2005, and they have continued mostly without a break since that time. That’s a lot of photographs! I haven’t actually counted, but it must be getting close to 3000 or more.

It would be reasonable to ask why I have done this. The full answer would be a bit complex and include a range of interrelated issues, so I’ll just share some basic thoughts here.

• I was trained in music, where regular practice is fundamental. There are many ways to learn things, and many factors affect the best balance among them, but when it comes to an activity that relies on the instinctive ability to see things more deeply and immediately and to respond effectively and intuitively, regular and thoughtful repetition is a powerful tool. Understanding the importance of musical practice and how it works is fundamental to my approach to blogging and sharing photographs. What better way to ensure that I practice than to make a commitment to producing credible work on a regular basis?
• In photography, as in so much creative work, it is imperative that the artist must not only make a lot of mistakes but that he/she must accept them as part of the process, and learn and grow from them. My choice is to do the opposite of sharing only a few examples of best work, and to instead essentially make my work process open and visible. Speaking of which…
• I have no illusions that I can produce 365 “great” photographs each year, and that isn’t my goal. (Ansel Adams said that 12 in a year was an excellent crop, and I tend to agree.) I like to think that just about all of the photographs are credible, have the potential to be interesting, may provide a clearer overall picture of me as a photographer and how I see the world, and that among them there will be occasional best work.
• I like to have my work seen, and I also like to share some background and thinking behind the photographs, hence the brief descriptions with each photograph.
• Putting the photographs and information about them online creates a sort of instant searchable archive of my work. (Believe it or not, it is sometimes faster for me to locate one of my photographs on the web than to find it on my own computer!)
• The availability of my photographs on the website (and elsewhere) has marketing value. (Truth be told, though, the sales value is often less than some might think.)

Sometimes people wonder how I manage to the task of creating and posting photographs on a daily basis, and how I find time to accompany the photographs with brief written descriptions.

• This is not a “photo-a-day” or “365” project, where one actually goes out with the camera and makes a new photograph every day. Sometimes I do not photograph for days or occasionally longer, but at other times I devote myself intensely to making photographs and create a lot of new work — and the overall average rate produces enough photographs for a daily post.
• When possible I try to queue up photograph posts ahead of time. As I write this today, near the end of September, I have photographs queued up through nearly the end of October. The posts include a range of work — Chicago and New York travel photography from earlier this summer, a significant amount of landscape work from the past month or so, some photographs from a current project with classical musicians. No doubt I will slot some other subjects into this mix before the current queue is empty. Only once or twice have I arrived at that scary point where I had nothing ready to go — and it really was a matter of going out and making a photograph now!
• I know that writing is a challenge for lots of people, but once I get going it is not a big challenge for me — at least not when it comes to creating a few paragraphs for web posting.  Writing the text for the daily photographs takes little time at all. (That’s perhaps that academic background again, where writing is an important and regular task.)
• I understand — for the most part — how web writing is not the same as traditional writing. On the web, taking too much time to edit and perfect writing can end up leading to no posting at all. While there are exceptions, it is often better to simply write (thoughtfully), do some basic editing, and get the writing out there… and to be ready and willing to return to update, correct, and expand as needed.
• If you imagine me at my computer every morning at 5:00 AM Pacific Time, manually writing and posting, I’m afraid that I have to disappoint you! The posts virtually always are prepared in advance and go out automatically, and the initial repost to social media sites happen the same way.

Since this is only a “Morning Musing” post, I’ve written enough about this for now — though there is much more I could say. Questions? Comments? Feel free to share!

Morning Musings are somewhat irregular posts in which I write about whatever is on my mind at the moment.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.