The Thousand Hour Challenge

I've been meaning to get back to the blogging world instead of posting notes on Facebook for a while, and the Thousand Hour Challenge seemed like a great first post! The idea first came a week or two ago to just hang out in an intersection all day and shoot whatever I happened to see. When I got to Guatemala it morphed into this insane challenge to go to the center square and shoot 1000 images in one hour... just to see if I could do it!

There are a few rules... No chimping. No editing. No cropping. Everything shot, goes in the show. And no laying down on the shutter just for shot count.

Yesterday I tried it. Unfortunately, I failed. 1000 images is a lot... like one every 3.6 seconds for a whole hour! I only got off 743 shots in before my hour was up. That, however, is still 1 image every 4.8 seconds for 3600 seconds! I shot 4GB of jpegs, downloaded them to my computer, mixed three Guatemalan marimba songs in Audigy, and used Picasa to throw it all together into a roughly 10 minute video. The result is, well... different.

It was interesting for me to switch shooting styles... I found myself taking pictures of things that I wouldn't normally shoot... not because they don't catch my eye, but because I can't fill the frame perfectly, or otherwise turn it into something phenomenal. This is a much rougher cut of the real world, and perhaps in that way, more interesting. I feel as though I've captured more of normal, everyday life, instead of just the things that look really cool. If you have the patience to watch, I hope you enjoy it!

R