Lessons from a Year of Day in the Life Shooting – Poulsbo Family Documentary Photographer

About a year ago I decided to take one day out of every month and shoot a personal day in the life; to document that day from start to finish (more or less) in a project I titled Here and Now.  It wasn’t a small task as shooting a full day, culling, editing and then blogging it is not a particularly small task.  But I have failed, with flying colors no less, every single daily or weekly shooting project I have ever taken on.  There is something about needing to do something small on a daily or weekly basis that is just asking for me to forget about it.  The state of my house really speaks to that.  But a larger more infrequent task that I can write on the calendar?  That, I can get behind.

The rules were simple. Shoot one full day, every month, on or around the 15th.  If we had something fun scheduled for that day, awesome.  It would be a super easy day to shoot.  If we were just sitting around the house all day (and there were several of those days) then, well, “pretty easy” images be damned! I would shoot that day anyway.  If I gave myself a pass because a day was “boring” then it would be way too easy for me to miss a month.  Plus the whole purpose of starting the project was to grab accurate samplings of what life is like right now.  If they were all trips to the beach, or walks down town, or playdates with friends that would hardly be accurate.

Shooting a full day each month over the course of a year taught me several things but here are my top 5 takeaways from this project:

1. There is beauty in every single day.  And I don’t mean that in a lofty, photographer, “the everyday and the ordinary is full of beauty” sort of way – although I totally buy in to that too.  I mean there was more than one day where I shot even though I wasn’t motivated to shoot.  There was more than one day I shot that was a quantifiably crappy day filled with tears, and yelling, and general parenting of a toddler.  You know, the type of days where you put the kid to bed, pour yourself a well-deserved drink, and mumble “Well shit, I’m glad that’s over.”  Even on those days I was always able to grab a moment of joy, a moment of quiet understanding, or a moment of peace.  Those moments may be fleeting but there are still there, even on the worst days.  And just knowing that makes life a little better.

2. Sometimes you need to let the work digest, and digest, and digest a little more.  After shooting some of those less motivating days where I felt like I was shooting at things instead of creating images with intent, I loathed uploading the images.  I knew I would be disappointed and I wasn’t going to allow myself a do over. Sometimes I was pleasantly surprised.  Sometimes the outcome was exactly what I anticipated.  But the weird thing is, I found that after I let the RAW files sit, untouched for days, weeks, even a month, I’d come back and always find at least one or two images that I really liked.  Distance and time can do more good than they get credit for.

3. Not every shot is going to be portfolio worthy and not everything that isn’t portfolio worthy is without value.  You go to any photographer’s portfolio and for each mind blowing image you see in their portfolio there are at least 50 other images that aren’t there.  Secretly, we want each and every image to be our magnum opus but basic logic and statistics says it can’t be that way.  You shoot 10 photos and one is going to be the best, one is going to be the worst, and the other 8 are going to fall somewhere in between.  But just because an images isn’t portfolio worthy doesn’t mean that it can’t be useful or that you can’t love it anyway.

If you are building a visual story sometimes you just need an image to move you from one moment to the next and sometimes that image is going to be lackluster.  So the image may hold value to the story.  If the image is left out, the narrative may not be as clear.  Or perhaps you just love the moment but it’s not perfect, you should feel free to love it anyway. In this industry where so much of the personal gets muddled in the professional, it’s so easy to get mad at yourself for missing focus, or for shooting too wide when we quickly snag your camera to catch moment that is in the middle of happening.  But you could have just as easily decided to give up on the moment and left the camera on the shelf since there was no way you were going to be able to get the perfect shot immediately.  So I say, give yourself a pat on the back for just taking the dang shot.  It doesn’t matter if it’s out of focus, or grainy, or cropping a toe; you have captured something that would have been lost if you hadn’t had the presence of mind to depress the shutter.  And that gives you the right to choose love that image despite any technical flaws.

4. Get in the picture for better and for worse. A year ago when I started shooting these monthly day in the life sessions I was primarily shooting for myself.  It provided me with a structured and disciplined way to improve my craft as well as ensured I thoroughly documented my son’s early childhood antics in an honest way.  At some point toward the end of the year that motivation shifted a little bit.  It became less about me and more about the documentation that I was leaving for my family. We won’t always be in this house.  My husband won’t always have this job that steals him away for days/weeks/months at a time leaving our son and myself to our own devices.  And, I won’t always look this way. Now, I’m about to lay some hard truth on everyone, no one is getting younger.  Sure, maybe in a week or two my skin will clear up a bit.  Maybe this year I will get into a regular work out routine and tighten up a bit.  And of course if I just wait until later in the day I can get a photo of myself showered and made up.  But it’s not entirely about getting in the frame at my current best because, “if not now, then when?”  It’s also about getting in the frame at less than my best because I want my son to be able to look back and accurately remember climbing into bed with me early in the morning and watching cartoons.  I want him to remember how we would frequently spend all morning in our pajamas and grazing on breakfast.  If he has trouble conjuring up what I looked like before my hair turns totally gray or what I looked like without makeup because I decided to curate the times I appeared in photos until after I was “made up”, that would break my heart.

5. There is always something to shoot.  I happen to be a very moody shooter.  I go through spurts where I barely pick up my camera because I’m too stressed or distracted to see things that motivate me to shoot.  I used to think that this was an external issue; I didn’t want to shoot cause the weather was gross, there wasn’t enough daylight, I was bored with shooting in my house, etc.  However, I have found that when I force myself slow down and pay attention to the light and life that is happening around me, I can always find some beautiful little scene.

One year later, I’ve changed, my son has changed, our kitchen has changed.  We’ve managed our way through a deployment, travels, and tantrums.  This coming year will have just as many changes and I plan on continuing to document them one month at a time.