Month two of my 365 did not run quite as smoothly as month one did. In fact, the last few weeks have felt like a continuous game of catch up. For someone who loves planning as much as I do, this has been pretty frustrating. However, I’ve managed to hang in there for another month with this project, which, with a full time job, I think, is worth being proud of.

And I learned a few things! Like how to do double exposures, getting over certain fears I’ve had, and the correct way to frolick in the woods with a lacy dress.

The things I’ve learned this month:

  1. It is probably overdone, but I wanted to try my hand at some double exposures (although going the semi-cheater route by using photoshop, not film). It took longer than I thought it would to figure out how to do it, (turns out it’s not just one image on top of another with the top image’s transparency turned down, but was actually a bit more complicated than that). It also was also slightly more difficult to figure out what images looked good combined with each other. Once I finished my first double exposure and got the hang of it, though, I was able to create the remaining three pretty quickly. I am pleased with the results!

 

  1. I also was able to overcome my fear of the saturation slider! When I first started out with photography, the photo editing software I had was limited to the saturation, exposure, and sharpness sliders and the crop tool. Of course, being new to photography, and having the very colorful New Delhi as my subject, almost every one of my “edited” photos from that time not only are over-sharpened, but are practically screaming with an over-abundance of highly-saturated colors. As I started improving, however, I learned that the mark of a good photo is not oversaturating, oversharpening, or overANYTHING-ing and from thence forth avoided the saturation slider like I avoided math classes in university. While I learned that any photo editing technique can make a beautiful impact if done sparingly, I never could get over my developed fear of the saturation slider. With my images from days forty-five and thirty-eight, however, I decided it was time to get over my fear and recognize the saturation slider for the wonderful tool that it is (…IF it is used sparingly…).

           Because really, aren’t you as mesmerized as I am with the greens in these?!

 

 

  1. I also learned that curtains with the rubber blackout lining on the back make for exceptionally difficult material to sew with. Rather than passing through under the foot, the fabric just gets stuck. Never again!

          (Although, I’ll be honest. That’s probably not true. I bet you $20 that the next time I leave Savers there will be a set of curtains in my hands, rubber backing and all. Can you be addicted to thrift store shopping? Is that a thing?)

 

  1. Just because it doesn’t look good from the back of your camera, doesn’t mean it’s a bad photo. While out shooting with my friend Kari, we were trying to take pictures peeking through the boughs of a pine tree. Looking at the tiny little screen on the back of my camera, the pictures refused to turn out how I was envisioning them and so, after a few shots, we abandoned the idea and moved on. However, when I pulled up the images in Lightroom several days later, those very same images grabbed my attention as soon as my scrolling pulled them up on my screen. I was mesmerized and edited them right then and there to use in my 365.

 

 

  1. Dresses can look totally different in a photo than they do in real life. Take the dress in the photos below, for example. This was one of my instagram followers’ favorite photos over the last month.  While going through my costume chest with me last week, however, my friend pointed to my frilly blue (former) wedding dress I uncovered during my digging and exclaimed “what IS that? It’s hideous!”

          So either everyone is just being really nice and telling me the photo is pretty, or the dress actually photographs much better than it looks in person. I like to think (and hope) that it’s the latter.

 

 

  1. Taking self-portraits without a remote can be one heck of a workout… In the photo above, I had twenty seconds from the time I pressed the shutter release button on my camera to when I was supposed to be sitting serenely twenty feet away, dress arranged in elegant folds, on the verge of touching the water just as the image was captured….

          … which leads me to my next point:

 

  1. It’s actually very difficult to run through the woods in a lacy dress. No wonder princesses’ dresses would always rip and pull at them when they were running from the bad guys in movies! Those things catch on everything!

          … I really need to find my missing remote….

          … or maybe just buy a new one….

 

 

  1. I have found that, my favorite images are, more often than you would think, everyone else’s least favorite. I have decided, though, that this is because they can only see the end product. While I can see where the image was in the beginning and appreciate the process that got it to its end product, no one else can see that, and therefore appreciate it, quite as much as I do. The image below is a perfect example. 

 

 

  1. And finally, I learned that one, Instagram and Facebook have rather frustrating policies when it comes to adding songs to your videos (the only kind allowed has to be be royalty free, but not on YouTube? Explain this to me?) and two, finding good royalty-free music to use in said videos is really hard! It MAY have taken longer to find the music for this video, than it did to actually create the actual video. My night definitely felt wasted after scouring the internet for hours, only to find one song that actually worked for what I wanted (thank you, Josh Woodward, for the song, by the way!)

 

 

I’d be lying if I said this month was a breeze and that I felt relaxed and confident during these last few weeks. It was stressful. There were days that I missed, days that I had to double post to make up for it, and days where the images or shoots I had planned completely and utterly failed. But never once was there a single day when I felt like giving up this project and caving in to the demands of my busy schedule. Because there were also days I could hardly wait until it was time to post my newest image, to share it with my friends and followers. Those are the days that make this whole project worth it and, in roughly 300 days, I hope I will be able to say that with even more conviction.