I’ve been following the #joinindaily tag on G+ for a while and I’ve decided to try to participate.

The concept is simple: each day, a single theme is announced, you have the day to post (or not) a picture related to the theme. It’s not a competition, mostly a just for fun event.

I’ve done it for a few days and I have found 3 different usages:

• theme interpretation: trying to bend the word into something different. One of the best example was the theme “star”, which had a bunch of night skies but also a lot of creative approaches (starfish e.g.)
• tell a story: that’s currently what I’m doing, finding a picture and telling a story around it, being personal story around the picture taking (this picture reminds me of blah…) or story around what is in the picture  (this is a picture of a battlefield where this event happened…)
• technical prowess: basically, anything from editing, post-processing, technicalities behind the picture.

To help me, I’ve uploaded my picture to google photos which allows me to search with the power of AI and find random themes. As AI is only partially smart, sometime, you’ll have to bend the wording to find the pictures, but I think that’s part of the fun. This allows me to tap into ~14 years of pictures and several GiB, which gives me lots of chances to find something.

As a personal constraint, I want to keep posting pictures without private information (faces you could recognize for example) in it, which makes it more challenging for some theme. For people interested in this but not in my rantings, you can follow this collection on Google+.

I don’t know for how long I’ll be doing that and how assiduous I’ll be, but for now, this is a great fun and this gives me ideas on new pictures and allows me to think creatively.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to upgrade my photo gear and I’m now the proud owner of an awesome new zoom lens that I plan to use soon. I’ve also started to shoot raw + jpeg, which enables me to post-process (so far, I really suck at it though, but I’m trying to learn). Thanks for everyone (Inês, Allen, Miso 🙂 ) who proved me it was useful and gave me advices, I’m now using lightroom and I’m happy with the situation. Quite a lot of work currently and I mostly use the JPEG from the camera but I’ve seen the kind of improvement I can get from the raw version and this convinced me. One of the most obvious being light balance correction: the 2 pictures below have been made with the same lens (my new shiny), smae day but one with indirect flash and the other one with electric light. Shooting raw allows to have the same tone (and actually pick the one most relevant) for the picture. (pictures here are jpeg from camera).

When (If?) I manage to progress on the topic, I’ll try to share my tips and tricks on this topics as this is very much non trivial to start but the potential gain is huge (especially thinking about landscape pictures which can’t be really awesome without some post-processing)