Three Sixty-Five

When I wrote back in January I was just embarking on a 365. I planned to take a photo a day for the duration of the year, publishing them to Glass as I went. Somehow, the year is already drawing to a close—and as I write I have one photo left to take.

I’m glad I decided to take the plunge, and I’m glad it’s over. This was a drastic shift from only posting photos from time to time, and only sharing the ones I was reasonably proud of. It felt like a tilt towards quantity over quality. I remember approaching 100 days and wondering how I was going to keep it up for another 265. After the novelty of the first couple weeks had worn off, the next couple months were the drought. I regularly found myself camera in hand after 11pm, trying to find a photo of something around the house so I could just go to bed. The real low point was a couple sad slices of Domino’s pizza.

As I pushed through, though, things improved. I got more diligent about taking photos earlier in the day. Even when I did end up shooting things around the house in the evening, once I got past the obvious stuff, I started finding more interesting subjects, lighting, and camera angles. Or sometimes I just went for a late-night walk around the neighborhood.

When possible, I found inspiration in Glass’s monthly categories. In lieu of hashtags, there is a list of available categories, up to three of which can be added to each photo. Each month the Glass team adds and highlights a new one, which becomes a fun focal point for the community. Given the abundance of street cats here, I expected to take more cat photos than I did when they made April the month of the cat—but I did get featured among the staff favorites at the end of the month, and I’ve continued to add to the ranks of the cats of Glass as the year has gone on.

Overall, I think my average quality towards the end of the year was markedly better than the first part. The practice of carrying a camera almost everywhere and looking for photos in the everyday began to reinforce itself. Getting a lightweight, weather-resistant pancake lens made a huge difference to the ease of keeping a camera on hand. This past month I’ve also been using my new iPhone camera a lot, which has paired well with Glass’s new Everyday category for December.

I’m looking forward to putting this project behind me while taking some of the gains with me. I’m looking forward to feeling the freedom to be more selective in what I post, and to publishing photos from the archives—especially finding good ones when new monthly categories are added. On the other hand, I hope to settle into more frequent sharing and more everyday/street photography than my pre-2023 average. In short, I hope the stretching I have felt through this project is at least somewhat inelastic.