I have always said that I don’t take pictures on order. I learned the hard way to say ”no” every time somebody asked me to take pictures in their wedding or do portraits and I even hesitate to take pictures of anybody’s pets if they ask. Or if there’s a situation where I would have to take pictures of a certain motif, it’s impossible, my creativity just doesn’t flow that way.

This is why I have always avoided the projects that many photographers take on, for example to take a picture every day. I can only go shooting during the weekend, what on earth would I shoot on dark winter evenings? I’m not a studio photographer and I can’t shoot night sky every night…

But lately I’ve been thinking that I have become too passive in my lifestyle. When the evenings got dark, I went into hibernation – all I do after work is sit in front of the computer at home. I spend almost all of my waking time in front of a computer, what kind of life is that?! I need to do something to activate my brain and that’s when I decided that I will indeed take on a ”picture of the day” project. These are my rules:

1. Try to put some thought into it and use the SLR.
2. If something special or unusual comes up but the conditions are wrong or there is no time to think through the picture, a snapshot qualifies as ”picture of the day”.
3. If something special or unusual comes up when I don’t have the SLR at hand, a picture taken with the camera phone qualifies as ”picture of the day”.

I expect to be taking a lot of crappy pictures in the course of this project because I will have to tackle subjects I don’t normally shoot (indoors studio shooting in the winter). But crappy or not, at least I’m trying!

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With this lousy winter we’re having, my project has a tough start. For the past weeks I’ve done my weekend walks without a camera, because the landscape is just miserable. But since I needed to create something today, I had the camera with me and it turned out that if I had not had the camera, I would have been disappointed because I found something interesting. I spotted an old path so I checked it out, and ended up in an old dumping site. There were old buckets and milk barrels and beer cans and things I don’t even have a name for, in various stages of rusting away. But this bucket which was lodged in the roots of a big spruce took the price – how long has it been there for the roots to grow around it like that?

I wanted to convert this to B&W but I couldn’t process it so that the bucket was dominant in the picture. So I left it in colour, but muted them to make the picture a bit more depressing so it matches the conditions today. It shouldn’t be possible to walk in the forest in January!