366 X 2012

There are quite a few daily photography challenges going on around the interwebs. I know that there are quite a few writing ones too, but I have never seen a hybrid. This year I want to force myself to publish a photo or a proper blog post/ article at least once a day. Sometimes I might even do both.

Practice, they say, makes perfect – and I need lots of it for my writing and photography if I am ever to be considered decent in any of the fields.

I find it easier to write than take (good) photos, so I am going to have a hard time convincing myself to keep a healthy ratio going. To balance this out I also aim to be stricter on my written contributions than I am on my photography ones.

I earn my keep writing, and have done so for years – so I will need to push myself to improve my grammar and style, but the real challenge is to inject a viral aspect. The target is to write content that is worth sharing and commenting on.

Initially I thought of setting myself a minimum word count, but even though I have a target in mind (around 400w,) I will not commit to it for one simple reason – I want to experiment with more condensed writing too.

Just because I have done so forever, I shall write about anything that comes to mind. There are a few topics that are closer to heart than others, however I have a wide range of interests and like writing about any of them at any given time. I might write tutorials, interviews, opinion pieces and reviews. I have a particular affinity for travel writing, so that will feature quite heavily too.

Photography is a passion that I have had for years. I have had quite a few photos published in print, but that was mainly in publications I was involved in – which, to a certain extent, means I was cheating. I want to take photos that are impressive enough to stand out in their own right – and for them to stand out on Google+ they will need to be truly spectacular. If I manage to get just one amazing truly spectacular photo out of this challenge I will be satisfied.

I can sometimes go through very busy periods, so I am building in a loophole – I don’t need to create something new every day, but instead I will commit to creating something for every day, and every one of them must have been created in the year 2012. I will do my best to publish something every day though, and even when I’m abroad (and with no internet access) I plan on scheduling my blog to publish something daily. Publishing to my blog on schedule does have one drawback – I can’t link the posts to Google+, but it’ll have to do.

I have quite a few other targets for 2012, so let’s hope I can keep up with everything. I know I will give it my best shot.

This post officially counts as the #1 of 366