His pictures tell a thousand words through 140 characters

No, holding a placard with your handle written across it to pose for a DP (that’s display picture for the uninitiated) is not a meme. For Roycin D’Souza, fresh out of his teens, it is a project and a number of ‘tweeple’ hope to get clicked by him.

Why? He picks an interesting Twitter personality and photographs them with things that define them -- one person everyday for a year. Tweeter A Day 365 or #TAD365 took off in June 2011, and has seen more than two lakh hits on the website.

“That’s more than 2000 hits a picture!” he says as he sets up his photo gear in my living room. (Yes, yours truly will be featuring in the project.)

“I have been on Twitter since 2009 when I was fresh out of SYJC,” says D’Souza. Beyond random updates, there wasn’t much for the teenager.  “But then I started attending gigs at the (Blue) Frog to shoot because I was clued into the independent music scene here. Also, I started to see that people liked what I shot. That’s when I realised that I was a 19-year-old who wanted to professionally pursue photography and if I wanted to be taken seriously, I had to use Twitter to market myself.”

D’Souza now tweets out pictures, gig alerts and more. “Switching to commerce after HSC was a bad idea, but that’s when I started getting interested in digital media. I experimented with websites for the college festival and it was working out well,” says the SYBCom student.

His tryst with photography started when he started shooting concerts regularly. “I borrowed cameras from friends because I didn’t have my own equipment and I didn’t want to ask my parents for money,” he says.

D’Souza put together his own camera and equipment over the last year, one assignment at a time. A digital enthusiast, D’Souza worked with a digital marketing firm. While he enjoyed his job, he admits that he decided to work only so he could buy his own camera and to satisfy his “tech fetishes.”

Wanting to explore and experiment more, D’Souza wanted to do a 365-day project. “Instead of shooting random things around me, I thought it would be nice to shoot interesting people. People can never have enough of their own pictures you know,” he continues as he grabs a piece of orange chart paper to cover the flash.

I ask him why he favoured Twitter over other social networks. “I have met so many people through Twitter. My job, my music concerts and music video assignments, all came through Twitter,” says the shutterbug. “Also, the audience on Twitter is far more mature than that on Facebook,” he observes.

So far, D’Souza has sought people he follows and finds interesting to participate in the project. “He randomly called me one day and asked if I was home. I had no idea what the project was!” says Bew D (real name withheld) who has the honour of being the first person on #TAD365.

And that’s pretty much how it has worked so far.

“So many times, I meet people for the very first time when I shoot them. It is so interesting. I’ll soon start going out to shoot people I don’t follow,” says D’Souza.

Traveling across the city, given the fuel price hike, can cost a bundle. “It all comes out of my pocket. That’s the way I want it. I don’t charge the participants anything,” says D’souza. While people have personally donated money to sponsor different aspects of the project like badges, he is in talks with brands to rope them in to create more value for #TAD365. “Even the money that comes from the brands, I plan to keep aside for a calendar at the end of the project.”

He plans to hand out button badges with their handle and the day that they featured to all the participants in the project besides merchandise like T-shirts and mugs.

“The project is an obsession. If I haven’t shot someone during the day, I start to panic,” says D’Souza, who hasn’t had a weekend off since he started the project. “Every weekend I run around the city to catch people who might be free to shoot!” he confesses.

What is fascinating is that he is about to make a trip to Delhi to shoot some Tweeple in the north.

“@Deepikah from Delhi made a Tumblr spreadsheet, collected cash and surprised me. She has gotten me enough money to get me to Delhi. It will be a completely crowd-sourced trip,” says D’Souza.

He already has a map of the capital and will mark people’s localities and plan his trip accordingly to shoot them on each day. What’s more, people from Indore, UP and Punjab are going to travel to the capital to feature in #TAD365.

“The question of the season is ‘Have you been clicked by @RoycinD yet?’ and I was wondering why such cool projects don’t happen in Delhi,” says Deepikah Arora, 25, graphic designer who has found twelve people to fund the Delhi trip. What makes the project interesting to Arora is that it gives people a chance to put a face and a personality to a Twitter handle.

In addition to the Delhi trip, the project has already had a taste of celebs with comedian Vir Das and international music artiste Imogen Heap featuring in it. “I plan to approach celebs! Most celebs who genuinely use Twitter make sure that they reply,” says D’Souza who doesn’t want to bother with celeb managers. “I want it to be as flexible and as crowd-sourced as possible!”

The project has made D’Souza a Twitter celeb. He is being approached by people who want to feature in the project all the time.

“I am also asking people I follow to recommend people I may not be following for #TAD365. There are so many interesting people out there, but I just don’t have the bandwidth to follow them.”

Speaking of bandwidth, how does he manage the college, a job and the project? “I am quitting my job to explore the project and other photography and production opportunities,” he says.

The project has been rechristened twice.

“I can’t even remember the first name, but then I named it #TwitterADay365 primarily because the project is exclusively on Twitter and everything will remain there,” explains D’Souza who recently changed the name yet again to #TAD365 or TweeterADay365 due to copyright guidelines laid down by the social networking site.

The photog is quite focused about what he wants to do after the project. “Hopefully I’ll be in a position to do more photography projects. I will be done with my TYBCom and I can focus on experimenting and learning more,” He also plans to host a massive Tweet-Up (Twitter meet) for all his participants along with an exhibition of the project.

While he diligently puts up the picture for the day, D’Souza gets constant reminders if he is slightly late. “It’s encouraging!” says D’Souza as he hands me a white paper and a felt pen to write out my Twitter handle. And then, he clicks my picture, a special picture that defines me and my interests and a picture I will treasure.

You can see the entire set of images under this project on Roycin D'Souza's website: roycin.com/blog/tweeter-a-day-365/