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For all 31 days in the month of May 2012, I participated in the “Photo a Day” challenge on Instagram. Several friends had previously done the monthly challenges, and I thought I’d try it because it would be a good way to force myself to mindfully set out to make a photograph every single day. I’m proud to say that I didn’t miss a single day, but more than half of the photos I made were quite far from being “art” or anything like it. I’m still glad that I did it!

The gallery above features my 10 favorite photographs from the full set of 31. I mostly stuck with my favorite IG filter, the lo-fi filter, which imitates the dark, saturated look of classic lomography. Some of the early photos felt to me like they were among the best, and I thought the very last photograph of my wife at the beach turned out the best of all.

In addition to the test of one month’s commitment, the whole exercise got me thinking about composition in a different way: for a square frame, as opposed to the horizontal or vertical frame for most cameras. Composing the photograph for a different view made me re-evaluate some of my assumptions about balance and direction within an image.

You can follow me @jeffresno on Instagram if you’ve got the smart phone app. I’ll be happy to get back to making random photo art for a while now.