TL;DR – Link to my OpenSea #lockdowndaily NFT collection: https://opensea.io/collection/lockdowndaily
What is it?
2020 saw the start of the Coronavirus pandemic. In March of that year, the UK went into lockdown, with no inter-household mingling or unnecessary travel. Employees who couldn’t work from home or weren’t essential were furloughed – Being a software engineer, I was lucky enough to just continue working from home.
At the time, I lived alone, and no one had any realistic idea how long the lockdown would last. To keep myself busy and trying to be creative, I decided to challenge myself to produce “a photo a day” during lockdown, and my #lockdowndaily project was born. This eventually turned out to be 103 days of images, with some exceptions: The first exception is Day 71, also known as #blackouttuesday. The second exception is some of the days ideas required multiple images, so there are actually more than 103 images (the total number is 113).
I didn’t really know what this project would turn into; I started it primarily in a selfish attempt to work on my composition and editing. I didn’t expect people I’d never met to get invested and care about what I was making – Some of the ideas people suggested even became part of the project.
I openly questioned whether to continue around Day 60 because I was having real trouble creating new ideas in a small house on my own, but the Instagram/photography community support was so encouraging, I realised that my simple little photo project actually belonged to everyone who was getting something out of these images. What I ended up with was something I truly loved and was proud of; A body of work that represented so much shared experience of a once-in-a-lifetime global event. Some are very personal, others are more abstract, some attempt to document lockdown life and others still are just plain fun. I even had the opportunity to get my first ever photobook created so that my project became something physical.
Enter NFTs
I recently started looking into turning some of my photography into NFTs, and I gradually realised that my #lockdowndaily project was the perfect candidate for an NFT project.
I love the idea of uniqueness and originality, so despite my editing ability improving significantly over the 103 days of lockdown (and since), I’ve not re-edited any of the images in the project. Every single one is simply the full-resolution version of the originally shared image on that day.
To be clear, I work as a programmer. Photography is my creative outlet and something I truly love doing. I’ve never set out to make any money from my images, and even when taking on commercial projects for friends, I don’t have a price list. NFTs to me represent the perfect way to create the digital version of my photobook, with each one being unique, but able to be distributed into the world and even collected.
So, here we are… I’ll update this article when I’ve decided on which platform to produce my NFTs on. In the mean time, please feel free to DM me on Instagram or Twitter with any advice as I’m still hugely green to the whole NFT scene!
Take care of yourselves!
EDIT: You can find my #lockdowndaily NFTs in an OpenSea collection here: https://opensea.io/collection/lockdowndaily