2017 in Photos

In an attempt to get better at photography, this year I started photo.cate.blog and shared a photo a day to it (the total was 366… so I guess I shared one extra but I’m not sure when). I also shared these photos on Instagram. I wasn’t a huge fan of Instagram at first and was irritated when it spammed all my Facebook “friends”, but 1) I’ve found a number of raccoons (and otters!) to follow on there and 2) a lot of my friends use it, and it’s nice to see their happy moments.

Depending on the day I tended to either:

• Take a photo of something in the moment – even on a relatively boring day.
• Choose a recent photo and edit it.
• Pick a picture relatively randomly and force myself to make it interesting. I got creative with filters, cropping etc.

None of the photos are selfies (well – except for two of my feet). Much as I love the selfie as a genre, this wasn’t a project to collect a bunch of photos of myself, but rather a project to collect a years worth of glimpses of the world as I see it.

It’s been nice to build up a library of processed photos, and edit things more than I would when just capturing a snapshot on Twitter. I think it’s made me better at both taking photos and editing them – I learned that I take basically every image 0.6 degrees off, for example. It also gave me a reason to use the WordPress apps every day. We’ve been working hard on making the media experience better, and I’ve seen my experience get better as the time has passed.

Here’s to more – and better – photos in 2018!