Saturday June 24, 2023

PORTO CERVO SARDINIA – This is day 5,000 of my photo-a-day project. That is 5,000 days in a row, taking at least a picture every day, whether I feel like it or not, without a miss.  13 years and six months.  Not all images are great, or even very good.  But approaching art as a job to be done daily has immense personal rewards.  More often than not, I’m surprised by the quality of the images that I produce.

I’m here in Sardinia surrounded by family and friends – a good setting for reflecting on how lucky I’ve been to be able to push this project this far.

Lucky to have my health. Lucky to have two sensational adult children and six warm, lively and intelligent grandchildren. Lucky to be married to Maria, who has unfailingly supported this project and who tolerates being ambushed as a model. Lucky to have the means to travel to places we love.  Lucky to be alive.

I always have a Leica by my side, and I fuss with it when I first get up in the morning to ensure that it is ready to shoot.  The way these cameras and lenses render reality is ample return on the fearsome investment in them.  I shoot Leica M cameras because I see images better through a rangefinder – seeing the parts of the image outside of the frame lines is a great aid in composition.

A majority of my work – way more than half – has been shot with monochrome Leicas, currently an M11 Monochrom.  I sometimes shoot film in a Leica M2-R, but film presents timing and documentary challenges in the photo-a-day context.  I also own a Leica point and shoot (a Leica Q3) which captures in color – when I shoot color, I translate it to black and white in post processing.  But in general, I prefer the more film-like look of the Monochrom.

People ask “Why black and white?”  The simple answer is “Because that’s what I do.”

People ask: “What types of things do you photograph?”  The answer is “Whatever there is.”  While not intended as a documentary, it was inevitable that this project documents my life.  Like life in general, subjects are usually mundane.  There are a dozen or so threads (solo people in the city shown at large scale, for example), themes that recur in my visual world.

Keeping track of my work and documenting the fact that I shoot every day has required a major organizational effort.   The main function of this website is to document this project.  I reach larger audiences in social media, primarily Instagram.  I photograph every day but post irregularly.  If I believe that a day’s work is dull, I post it here for the record but skip it on social media (yesterday’s cactus, for example).  It’s been a while since I’ve written a real narrative here – I’m enjoying this so I’ll experiment with a weekly narrative, perhaps every Sunday.

I look back past work from the same day (for example June 24), because it gives me the opportunity to re-edit earlier work with fresh eyes, and because otherwise past work would disappear down the pile forever.

So today we have an image of four-year-old Oliver on a kick board, and some richly-rendered rocks off of the beach here.  From 13 years ago we have an image with a “privileged” point of view under the roof of the Quito Ecuador cathedral.  I’ll be sharing more old images from Ecuador over the next eight or ten days.

Day 5000 of one photograph every day for the rest of my life!!

The following is stitched from two frames. Shot with a Leica APO-Summicron-M 50 mm Asp at full aperture. One of three perfect lenses for the M Monochrom.

On this day exactly 13 years ago – under the roof of the Quito Ecuador Cathedral. Day 252 of one photograph every day for the rest of my life.