I’ve been doing my Project 356 photo challenge for six months now. I’m pleasantly surprised by how I’m going, and have scattered some of my favourites through here.

When I first started the challenge on 1 January, I was sure I’d get bored and give up sometime around March at the latest. But I’ve made it halfway through now, and not only have I not missed a day (though there have been a few close calls!), I’m having more fun with it than when I started, and I’m seeing the improvement in my photography skills.

At the start, I was very much a point-and-shoot, centre-your-subject ‘oh, that’ll do’ photographer. Slowly, though, I’m learning some of the rules of composition and how to look at things in a more interesting way. I expected to take a whole lot of photos of my cat: there have probably been more than I’d like, but of the last 180 days only four have been of him (and only five more are of other furry mammals). I’m also slowly getting to grips with Lightroom and Photoshop, which has been a bigger challenge than taking the photos themselves – the photos are the easy part.

It is a pain in the butt some days, especially because I work from home so often have days where I don’t go anywhere, and it’s pretty obvious which ones are of the oh-crap-I-forgot variety. That’s something I’ve learned: you get better results if you take your time and consider it carefully rather than quickly get it done because you’re out of time, which equally applies to copywriting (and just about anything else).

I’m keen to see how I go for the second half. It helps that my partner has upgraded his camera so I have full use of a Nikon DSLR, a big upgrade from my Fujifilm point-and-shoot, and a whole new learning curve.

Sometimes I think we expect to be great at something immediately. I know I do. This is a good reminder that that doesn’t usually happen, but incremental improvement will happen if you keep at it, and it’s nice to have visual proof of that.

As if everything else I do wasn’t enough of a challenge, this year I’ve decided to set myself an extra one: starting 1 January 2011, I am going to undertake the 365 Project photo challenge. I’ve been wanting to do this for a couple of months but decided to wait till the new year to make it a nice clean start.

Taking one photo every day for a year is a daunting proposition for me. I have next to no photography skills (though I can always spot other people’s mistakes!), and quite honestly, learning about apertures and f-stops and Lightroom and Photoshop fills me with something that’s not quite horror, but doesn’t feel good. But I want photography skills. I want to look at an awesome photo and think, I took that. I love looking at photos and am always amazed at the creative ways photographers look at the world. I want to see a world like that.

So, that’s my challenge. I’m blogging about it, I guess, to set out my reasons for doing it so that I have something to remind me why I’m doing it when it gets hard sometime around, oh, 16 January.

But it’ll be cool to look through the photos in a year and see what I did and be proud of my new mad skills.

So, if you’re interested in following my challenge, this is what you should know. 1. I won’t necessarily upload every day. I’ll do what I can but some days it won’t happen; but I will upload all the photos eventually. 2. Expect to see a lot of pictures of my cat, especially at the start of the challenge when I get to 10pm and realise I haven’t taken a photo that day. 3. Comments are welcome, nay, encouraged. It’s more fun that way.

I’ve set up a set on Flickr, if you care to see what I get up to this year

Flickr user: (matt)

One of the joys of self-employment is that when you first feel the niggle of a winter malady coming on, you can launch a pre-emptive strike to ward it off, employing tactics that would be completely inappropriate for a public workplace.

Need to stay warm? Ditch the nice clothes, and stay in your pajamas, or better still, a onesie. Feel like you need a nap? Get a hot water bottle, and snuggle up in bed for an hour. And you can eat foods that have huge benefits for keeping your immune system humming, but which should never enter a public area. I’m talking, of course, about raw garlic.

Yesterday I started feeling a bit more grumpy than usual, my nose started running, and I wasn’t happy with the way the back of my throat was feeling. It’s vital that I stay healthy, because I’m off to a wedding in a week that will involve a plane trip and a holiday. Last time I flew with a cold I was almost in tears from the pain on descent, and nobody wants to be the person coughing all through the ceremony.

So I did some research into what I could do to nip it in the bud fast, but which didn’t involve drugs. I’ve been a fan of lemon and honey in the past, and ginger and garlic, but I was interested to read a bit more about garlic. Anecdotally, it’s been used for centuries for its antibacterial and antiviral properties, and is best used crushed because that releases allicin, thought to be the active compound. More information can be found here.

After an initial dose of two cloves, I’ll take another one tomorrow, and for a couple more mornings before we leave. Hopefully by then I’ll have results that will enable me to stay healthy. And as for my partner, with whom I share the office? Well, he’ll have to put up with me being all garlicky for a couple of days, but better him than an office full of workmates!