By Arlette Montilla

17 June 2007

You look at yourself everyday in the mirror. At least in the morning while brushing your teeth you look at that messy reflection of yourself with a winked sleepy eye. For most of us to look at ourselves image became a mania and almost every reflecting surface works as a mirror: a crystal window, a spoon, a water puddle, the back of an ipod, the windows of the subway while it passes in front of you.

The challenge of 365 project is to capture in pictures that moment of yourself every day for a year: the photographer becomes the subject, the main and recurrent theme, and the "leitmotif". If you start 365 project be prepared for an extraordinary psychological, social, artistic and technical experience.

Getting to know yourself

A daily-obligated close encounter with you every day is something that we are not prepared for. In time you will find yourself discovering your body language, how your eyes look when you are angry, happy or sad, how daily emotions are reflected in your face and you did not notice before, how tiredness affect your skin, how is your own esthetic, your good and bad angles, your body parts. It works well encouraging your self-confidence. You will love, hate, be bored, reject and improve your physical and emotional self. Is a rollercoaster journey that will end in acceptance and reconciliation with your best friend: YOU. It is easy to start feeling narcissist, self centered, egoist, swellheaded, self-absorbed, self-involved, egocentric but don't let it mess with your mind: we all photographers are egomaniacs.

Your own time

If you are not alone at home, if you are usually surrounded by people and did not use to spend time with yourself, starting 365 project could be a drastic change for others as well. As egomania is related to an obsessive preoccupation with the self, others can feel out of the equation of the project and your life. For the first time you will have your own space and privacy at least for some minutes and is natural your people regret it. Talk to them, explain them what is it all about and if you feel so invite them to join you in the frame but they can not push the button to shot!

Let your brain's right side grow

Do you think you are creative enough not to take a shot of the same classy self-pose in front of the mirror with your camera on every day? To take a picture a day also confronts you with your skills, talent and creativity. You can easily find your best or worst inspiration moments while looking at the pictures you took of yourself every day. You will find yourself looking for props, lights, back stages, locations and a sort of inventions just to make every day's picture different. Your home can transform into a studio. 365 project definitively boost your muse.

Your assistants

Finally, as self-portrait implies to take a picture with no material and technical assistance you will discover the unthinkable ways to use tripods, timers, photometers and remote controls. Mirrors will become your best assistant and patience your best skill. You will prefer to work with your digital DSLR camera plugged to your pc or laptop and use it like mobile LCD viewer or find the new issued technical improvements to add a LCD viewer to your DSLR. You will discover how macro works in your skin and body parts and will find that the most amazing surfaces in the world are in your own territory. You will become an investigator; for sure you will read about skin color treatment. Definitively you will learn.

Bottom line

From time to time you will feel like quitting, so look for an sponsor, an accomplice, someone who supports you and believes in you but the most important thing is to think about the reward at the end of the project: a documentary of a whole year of your life, a visual evidence of your evolution as a photographer, as a person and as a self-confidence individual. Do you think you can do it? ... Go for it!!!

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Note of the author:

In the net there is a "365 days" Flickr group officially founded in August 2006 by Chris Maverick based on his own 365 days challenge which was inspired by another Flickr member. By the time I wrote this testimony the group had 4,399 members and 164,096 photos had been posted by them. This August 2007 some of the members will finish the project but is difficult to know how many of them will be. I joined the group and accomplished 88 self-portraits.So far is known that other photographers and also Flickr members started this project before the group was founded. One of them is Carrie Cizauskas with an amazing record of self-portraits every day without fail starting June 2nd, 2005.