Ever since I took a photo every day for a whole month in March, I can’t help but look at everything in a new way. I learned so much about myself and my photography through that whole process, a few of which I will share with you today. Here are three things I now know:

1. I need a camera nearby always.
After taking photographs every day, I find myself quite annoyed when I don’t have my camera on me at all times now. I’m outside with my dog and I notice an amazing shadow. I’m stopped at an intersection and spot the cool cloud formations above. The light hits my daughter in just the right way. These things in the past would have just been fleeting memories. Now that I’m striving to always have my camera on me, I can and do stop to photograph them much more often.

2. I’m lazy.
If I don’t have some sort of external force motivating me to take photographs every day, I won’t. I realized this right away — as in April 1st, the day after the project — that when there was no organized photo challenge for me to post my photos to, I stopped picking up my camera. Maybe it’s just me, but I think I benefit with a few deadlines in my photography. The every day thing is hard to keep up, but I do need to find something else to keep me motivated. A weekly photography project or goal, perhaps?

3. Perspective matters.
I notice as I look over my past photos that when I photograph common objects I tend to favor different views of them. And before you blow me off for calling myself “artsy”, let me say that this is mostly because my photography skills (and my camera, for that matter) aren’t anything amazing. Browse the pages and pages of Explore on Flickr, and you’ll realize quickly that there are a lot of really good photographers taking stunning photos of flowers and landscapes and everything else under the sun with a great eye, great skill and great cameras. So, since I’m still learning how to achieve all that greatness, what I can do is look at things in a new way and make ordinary objects in my life a little more interesting (like taking a photo of a curvy-stemmed daisy from a bug’s eye view like the photo above).

So those are three things I’m learning about myself in my photography. Things that sometimes keep me from picking up my camera. What are those things for you? Try to figure them out today, and then figure out how to find a way around them!