On December 25, 2025 I started a 365 Project where I take one photo every day for a year. Because I shoot a lot of film photos I ran into an organization problem because the day I take a photo and the day I can post the developed photo are often spread out pretty far. And while a Light Room Classic collection can sort by capture date, it's not easy to identify which photos were taken when and what day number of the challenge they belong to.
So with the help of Claude I built a little calendar view for Lightroom which not only shows you the gaps in the calendar where a photo needs to be placed, but also tells you what day of the challenge the photo belongs to.
I released it on GitHub and I hope you find it useful. Installation and usage instructions are in the project README.
🤖 Note, unlike my other AI-assisted software efforts this tool is 100% vibe coded and not human reviewed. I felt safe doing so because this is a read-only data viewing tool that performs no actions and works “good enough”. I did dogfood it by testing it against my own library and photos and making sure it doesn't “write” but that is the extent of my testing.
Last month I re-learned something that is obvious to any seasoned photographer: What you already own is usually perfectly good enough. Back in 2016, I bought a Panasonic Lumix GX8 and while I loved its video capabilities, I was consistently disappointed by the photos. Despite owning both a zoom and a prime lens, every image came out frustratingly soft.
The real kicker came with the arrival of the iPhone XR which took sharper photos (although at a lower resolution). I gave up on “real” camera photography for years due to making an amateur mistake of blaming sensor technology for my image quality problems. My assumption was that if my phone's tiny sensor could outperform my dedicated camera, my Panasonic must be outdated. Yet when I started film photography in January, I had a completely different mindset. I knew right away that the lens mattered more than the “sensor” (the film) did. I focused (pun intended) on purchasing the best lenses my budget could afford. For some reason, this fact didn't register for my digital setup until a few weeks ago.
March was filled with various photography explorations about one hour's drive from home. It's been really fun to see things differently now that I'm actually trying to notice minor details. It's also pretty crazy how much interesting stuff is within a one hour radius of where you live.
I've gotten to the point where I notice small things completely passively now. I no longer have to concentrate on looking at my surroundings–I just notice the small things automatically now. Speaking of which, there's some work that needs to be done on the house this spring...
I discovered Pyrocat-HD and I think it's my new favorite black and white film developer. My development costs are coming down now that I've developed 23 rolls of film by myself. I've gotten pretty good at the whole thing and have yet to make any developing mistakes. (If only that could be said for capturing the photo and loading the film correctly...)
Continuing the photography obsession in another genre—I've been playing around with some code for an app. I'm not sure if anything will come from it, but maybe in a few months I'll have something I can show off.
March was pretty much entirely work, cooking tons of lamb, loads of photography, and family life. I did manage to squeeze in a movie—something I rarely make time for any more.
I hate New Year Resolutions. They always seem too grand, too vague, or just... weird to me. So imagine my surprise when I kickstarted a new project in December of 2024 that suddenly shaped into a resolution or theme for 2025.
Just over a year ago, I bought a Chevy Bolt EV and have been taking it road tripping—which is, frankly, a terrible idea. It's a first-generation EV that charges slower than a glacier taking a coffee break. Unlike modern EVs, in the Bolt you drive for 2.5 hours, then charge for 20-45 minutes. It charges even slower in the winter, yet despite this limitation, I've covered several thousand miles over various road trips these past twelve months. Then, this month, after four years of “window shopping” on eBay, I finally took the plunge into medium format film cameras and bought a 1954 Yashicaflex A2 film camera.
