One road ends, and another begins. One year ago from today, I decided that I needed to challenge my creativity and grow as an artist. I loved photography but realized that my camera was collecting more dust than photos, so to counter this, I created a new Instagram account with the goal to take one photo everyday for 1 year. I created PROMATEUR, a play on the words PROfessional and aMATEUR, because I was creating content based on experience rather than what someone would teach me. Throughout the year I learned a lot about myself and a lot about photography. I learned that although one photo a day sounded easy enough, it was in fact a lot more work than I anticipated. One photo a day means that on average, I would need to go out into the world and find some sort of interesting image and have enough pride in it to post it as my #photooftheday. Once I realized that going out to take a photo everyday was impossible due to mixed schedules, uncooperative weather, mood swings, and procrastination, I begin to cheat by going out once a week and taking 7 great photos and post them throughout the week. After weeks of almost missing my daily photo, I would go on bigger photo adventures and capture every moment in a different way just to satisfy my own personal goal to reach one year of photos. Naturally this became more of a chore than an accomplishment and I had a few weeks of photos that I wish I hadn't posted. However going through my images, I see patterns emerge. I see colours and hues and brights and darks, and they all seem to flow with one another, creating waves of colours that I soon realized mimicked the wave of my psychology. Subconsciously, my creativity seemed to be affected by how I was feeling by contrasting bright green grass in the summer with dark and gloomy metro stations in the cold of winter. This realization makes me feel that I have grown as a person and a photographer over this past year, yet I've got so much more to learn. As I end this project, I would like to thank everyone that has supported me on Instagram, Tumblr and Facebook as you gave me the encouragement to keep going. Until next time, #forest #trees #wilderness #nature #quebec #home. (at Buckingham, Quebec)
