This is the sixth year that I’ve given myself the assignment to pick one month and take a picture each day of that month.  Last year I picked April, but this year I'm back to February - probably because it's the shortest month.  There was not much snow, but there was an abundance of dreary skies, cold weather and bad light.  However, as with previous projects, the images I took were not to be just “snapshots” – I had to at least try to get a decent photograph.  As always, if I came up with more than one good image on one day, I could not carry it forward to another day.  I did decide, however, to include more than one image for certain days (when I just couldn't decide which one to choose).  I did that last year, and I liked the results.

In some previous years, I restricted myself to using only a certain kind of lens (ultra-wide angle, telephoto, etc.) but last year I left the choice of lenses wide open, and added some other restrictions. I did the same thing this year.  I decided to concentrate on detail images, close-ups and even some still life work,  I also tried to force myself to use shallow depth of field quite a bit (something that I do not normally do).  As you will see, I did slip up by including a number of landscape images utilizing a stopped down lens with a broad depth of field.  It was just too hard to resist.

All of the problems that I experienced in past years surfaced again.  There were many days that the weather and/or light was such that I really would have liked to use one of the photos from a prior day.  A bout of stomach flu also didn't help the situation.  There were quite a few times that I had trouble coming up with a destination,  much less subject matter, and went out with only a vague idea of what I was going to shoot.

Here are this year’s results - and, once again, they are quite different from previous years’.  A few of the pictures achieve what I was trying to do, but some miss the mark.  Taken as a group, however, I think they are interesting (and certainly somewhat different from my "regular" work).  The experience was once again rewarding, forcing me to work in areas I am not used to - and hopefully gaining some skills that I can use in the future.  You be the judge if it was worth it...