A day in the life of the world

THERE’S a special event taking place tomorrow and you’re invited to participate.

No matter where you are, or what you’re doing, you can help record a day in the life of the world.

The organisers of global documentary project aday.org are asking every person on the planet with a camera and an internet connection to take a moment tomorrow and record a single image from their lives.

Whether it’s your car or your mammy, a butterfly, or your newly- painted toenails, the A Day project wants a moment from your life; a picture of something that matters to you.

Once you’ve taken the picture, you can upload it to the project website and all of the images submitted will be turned into one huge visual archive documenting for posterity everything that happens all over the world tomorrow, from Cork to Calcutta, Honolulu to Honaira, Jakarta to Jericho.

Masterminded by Swedish collective Expressions of Humanity, aday.org is the latest in a line of crowd-sourced photography projects that have become increasingly popular in recent years.

Both The New York Times’ “A Moment in Time” series and the “One Day on Earth” video project have been similarly ambitious and equally large in scale.

Be warned; unless you have many free hours to spend in endless contemplation of wonderful images and videos, do not go anywhere near those two websites.

Global collages like these are contemporary in their scope and immediacy, but they also hearken back to a great 20th-century tradition of international photography that had its zenith in Edward Steichen’s seminal 1955 exhibition The Family of Man.

A project like this is a great opportunity for everyone interested in photography, and great for the medium itself, says Denis Minihane.

An industry veteran, Mr Minihane is a newspaper photographer who has taken some of the most famous news photos in the recent history of the Irish Examiner and he believes that given the right circumstances, anybody can take a timeless shot.

“Quite often, the person who gets the right photo is simply the person who happens to be out there with the camera, in the right place at the right time. It’s a big wide world out there, and a project likes this gives you loads of opportunities to discover it.”

To help participants choose their subject matter, the organisers of the project have provided three broad categories for photos: Home, work, and connections. In other words, everything you see around you.

According to the organisers, everyone who takes a picture will have their image displayed online. Some of them will be made into a book called A Day In The World, which will be published this October. Every single image will be saved for posterity and none of the photos will ever be used for commercial purposes. Your copyright is assured also — now all you have to do is take your shot.

But how best to pick your subject? Simple, says Mr Minihane: Go for something that jumps out at you. “When I’m taking photos, I’m looking for something that stands out. When I’m looking with that kind of eye, I might see something different to what other people see. It might be a colour, an image, it can be something as simple as the shape of a tree.”

The photographer recalls one evening on a drive home from Bantry when he happened to look up at the horizon.

“I was looking around at the sky, and something caught my attention. I didn’t even know what I was looking at really, but I watched it for a few moments, and this amazing shape appeared. It was a whale’s tail, up in the clouds. I needed to wait a few moments though, to let it develop. And then, a few minutes after I got it, it was gone.”

It’s true the natural world provides countless opportunities for a good snap, but some of us may be more inclined tomorrow to try to get a picture of a human face.

It can be a tricky enough business getting your photo taken though, as anyone who has ever got married or been to a debs can attest.

For those of us planning to get a snap of a human subject, are there any fail-safe ways to get them comfortable?

Denis’s advice is straightforward enough: “Don’t take too long. Take the shot quickly; people become very self-conscious after a while. Try to get your shot in the first few seconds if you can.”

And it’s always best to shoot your subject in context too, he says.

“Try to get them in their natural environment if possible. If it’s a sports person, take them in the dugout for example. Try to get some of their story in the picture, get a sense of their relationship to their surroundings.”

Sometimes it’s this instinctive eye for a photo that makes for a standout shot. For Mr Minihane, it’s a photo he took in Cork a few years ago that sticks in the memory. “A man called Walter Swift was visiting Cork. He had been released from a Michigan prison after being falsely imprisoned for 26 years. He came over here shortly after and he met some of the press here in the old gaol in Sunday’s Well. I took a picture of him, standing there in a corridor with an exit sign by the foreground.”

The picture won the Law Society picture of the year award.

The aday.org project has already attracted high-profile supporters such as former president Mary Robinson and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Organisers hope that tomorrow, they’ll be joined by you. It doesn’t matter if the picture is taken on a mobile phone camera or a vintage Nikon.

All that is required is that you take a picture and upload it to the aday.org website within the next seven days. So take out your camera and follow your instincts.

Whatever you’re planning to photograph, enjoy it. A final tip for would-be photographers comes from Cork-based freelance photographer Clare Keogh: Channel your inner eight-year-old.

“The first proper portrait I ever took was with my first-ever camera. It was of my sister; we were on holidays in the States at the time.

“We were by a waterfall in a really leafy place and I remember that feeling of being really overwhelmed by the moment, of wanting to record it.

“I remember saying ‘we’ll have this picture for when we go home Aoife’. I was only eight, but it’s one of the best portraits I’ve ever taken. I’d be 100 years trying to recreate it.”