February 2021

Welcome to February

Welcome to February, the month of love! You have made it through a whole month of taking a photo a day. Give yourself a pat on the back. During January, you put yourself in front of the camera, photographed travel even though most of us are still stuck at home, spent a week looking for the color red, and got to intentionally break some of the rules of photography. As we greet this month of love, reflect on what you love about being on this journey of daily photography. Are you discovering particular subjects that you love to photograph? Are you discovering a love for a particular lens or camera settings? Maybe you are rekindling a relationship with photography that has been dormant for awhile. Whatever the case, celebrate the power of that love!

That said, remember that love does not bring with it a perpetual high. You still love your dog even after she has tracked mud all over your freshly mopped kitchen floor. You still love your kids even though they threw a bedtime fit and exhausted the last bit of energy you had. You still love your significant other even though they left the toilet paper roll empty. We need to have this kind of loving acceptance with our photographs. Not every photo we take will bring with it the same kind of powerful emotions that we felt with our first kiss. Nor will they all bring with them the heartbreaking disappointment of lost love. Just like the days of our human relationships, most of the photos we take as part of this photo a day project rest in the middle of this continuum. They provide us with a feeling of comfort and stability. Each photo we take is part of a bigger story, a story that encourages us to look for love not only in all the "right" places but also in those small and unexpected places. When you and your camera can find love in the image that didn't come out quite as you had hoped or in the photo that you didn't have enough time or energy to give to it then you are building a meaningful relationship with your camera.

To share love with others...and your camera, it is important to love yourself. We’ll spend the first week of February photographing what makes us happy. We will then move to a week showing our love of place by exploring the many ways to photograph landscapes. Pink is the color of universal love. It represents friendship, affection, harmony, and inner peace. So, what better color is there to be our February color of the month?! We all know that love can be a balancing act. To finish the month, and as a nod to finding balance in our photography, our final week of this month will be spent discovering how symmetry brings life and energy to our images.

We hope that you and your families are settling into this new year It is also our hope that in taking a photo a day, finding new ways to see the world around you, and being a part of the fabulous 365 Picture Today community you will find a little love.

Explaining the Prompts

The weekly themes designed to fire up your imagination, increase your skill level, learn new techniques and share your joy of the photography world!

PICTURE YOU week just might challenge you the most! Getting in front of the camera is important in so many ways. It teaches us how others feel when the camera is pointed at them and it allows us to be more comfortable in our own skin. When we include ourselves in a picture, it documents our days, but you don’t HAVE to be in the photo at all if it does not fit your style. There is freedom in this week, but we do challenge you to turn the lens around and get in front of it! (You have a million pictures of your family, but none of yourself, right)? Each PICTURE YOU week will have a GUEST PROMPT where a member from our community will be given the opportunity to write a prompt for us to follow! The guest prompt is designed for you as valuable members to stretch your creative abilities and show us what you’ve got!

PICTURE MORE is ‘technical week’. The prompts will let you explore your creativity with a technical agenda. This is the week to try new skills, revisit old ones and maybe learn some really interesting tricks. You might just surprise yourself with your technical genius! One of the greatest things about photography is its diversity. We will be exploring camera angles, symmetry, breaking the rules, negative space and other tricks to make your photography evolve! During this week we will be stretching ourselves with skills that may range from techniques such as light trails, long exposure, lens zooming and panning, or we may switch things up and add some processing fun!

PICTURE COLOR is all about color, a specific color on a Sunday chosen by one of the creative team that will be featured exclusively! Sometimes you will easily find these colors and other times these colours may be more difficult to find. Be patient - sometimes the color will just ‘pop’ out at you in the most unpredictable way! The color prompt week will most definitely make our galleries look lovely!

PICTURE STYLE is all about your style within different styles! Landscape, street, night, travel, portraiture, still-life, wildlife photography and other picture modes are going to be stylized to create some amazing photographs. We will also be playing around with shutter speed and double exposure to give your photos a different “pop”.

EXTRA CHALLENGES: Each month we are including SELF PORTRAIT, WHERE I STAND and MACRO MONDAY challenges. We also have the new QUARTERLY CHALLENGES. First up is PICTURE YOUR WORLD, where you hopefully will return to the same place each quarter to take the same photo (see the seasonal changes), second is the SCAVENGER HUNT that went down so well last year and finally we thought that SONG LYRICS will give us all a bit of a challenge, all totally up to you, if you want to incorporate this into your daily photo.

Daily Prompts