The first week of DailyShoots is over! All of the pictures that I uploaded, either because I used them for the DailyShoot or just because I thought they were cool, can be seen on my flickr.

I actually had quite a bit of fun with this. I was expecting it to be just a sort of OK assignment — not terrible, but not awesome, either — but it was actually a lot of fun. I struggled at first, but even my first picture actually turned out really well. Nearly every day, I checked the DailyShoot website early in the morning during my “drink tea and check facebook” time in the morning, so I could start thinking about what to take a picture of. Several times I realized pretty quickly what I wanted to do, but didn’t get around to taking the picture until late at night, while other times I had no idea, and just let the idea stew for a couple of hours.

Today’s picture was probably pretty typical in this regard. I read today’s DailyShoot assignment this morning (Well, it was probably technically afternoon, but whatever), but didn’t think about it in particular detail until after I’d gone grocery shopping, ate a couple of bagels, and did some other homework. (Davidian creativity is an iterative process) My initial idea was to use the flash to try and get inside of the holes in the plug, which turned out to be impractical for multiple reasons.

First, it turns out you can’t really do that. Second, the camera I was on was set up funny — the shutter speed was slow? I’m not sure of the correct terminology — so it took a long time for the picture to actually take, which, combined with the flash, made it all pretty much white. I screwed around with it some more, but then noticed that I actually could still see the plug somewhat, and it actually seemed pretty weird. I made it so the pictures would be darker, and then took a picture:

(Help, help, I'm being absorbed!)

And I laughed. And yet, it….was actually kind of eerie. Rather cool, and certainly more interesting than what I was expecting, but more than sufficiently creepy. I knew though, as I usually do, that this was the picture for today.

Which is one of the things that I find the most interesting about this assignment, after a week of taking pictures. I seem to have a pretty good idea of when I’ve taken an interesting picture — at least, when a picture is interesting to me. I wonder if the reason why I’ve been less interested in photography in the past is because I didn’t have the impetuous to keep taking pictures until I found one that I liked, and some sort of criteria, or goal, by which to judge the pictures by.

Hmm. Cool.