The Daily Shoot

The other day, while I was flying from San Francisco to New York and enjoying free WiFi, Mike Clark and I got to chatting on iChat about photography. During the conversation, we got onto the topic of practicing. More importantly, practicing every day. It's a bit of long held advice in the photographic community that practicing every day is a good thing. But, frankly, it can be hard to catch a little inspiration to shoot every day.

Mike said something along the lines of, "I wish there was a way you could give me an assignment every day of something to go shoot." My first reaction was that'd be nice, but how in the world do we do something like that and make it work. I've played around with these thoughts before for the book I'm working on (slowly), and my editor has been a big proponent of sorting out how to get the daily practice message out, but I didn't have an immediate answer as to how we'd be able to do this in the real world.

Then, as we chatted--me at 37,000' and Mike in his office--the wheels in both of our minds started turning and we started brainstorming. By the time the flight attendants came by with lunch service, we'd hatched a plan to stack up a bunch of daily assignments on a Twitter account feed daily by CoTweet.

Thus was born @dailyshoot.

The rules are simple. We post a daily photo assignment. If you're inspired, and we hope you are, you'll create a photograph with whatever camera you have, upload it somewhere, and respond to the assignment tweet with a link. That's it. Simple.

Within 30 minutes of launching @dailyshoot today with the assignment of "red", we've had lots of people start following and even five people submit their photos. Another red dawn by D'Arcy Norman. This Best Cam shot by Joel Zimmer. A shot of a red car by Bruno Miranda. Full Sodium by Mark Jones. And, this photo of a dart board by George Mason. Hopefully, by the time I submit this post, there will be more. And tomorrow, when another assignment is posted, I'm betting we'll have more photographers joining in.

The point of all of this isn't to try to whip out a daily masterwork. No, it's to get photographers out and about every day. To break the friction barrier between not shooting and picking up the camera to start shooting. Because it really is all about practice.

Update: In just the first 10 hours or so since we unleashed this onto the world, we've had what I think is phenomenal feedback. We've got over 300 @dailyshoot followers and loads of people posting pictures they've taken. Already, several of you have made great suggestions like sorting out a mashup to be able to see photos people take and setting up a Flickr group. We'll sort out where to steer this ship going forward, but we're pretty proud that we're already accomplishing goal number one: helping a bunch of photographers get out there and make photographs every day. And, if you want to see all the photos that people are linking up, just do a Twitter search for @dailyshoot. That's what we're doing.