Mike Andrew McLean gets a common response when people learn that he's a photographer: They love photography too — in fact, they took 3,000 photos on their last vacation.

"It seemed so much like digital photography is that — it's the accumulation of images," McLean said. "This number game somehow validates the act."

Thus was born the idea of Thirty-Five Thousand Forty, a project that saw McLean take at least 100 photos each day. It's a number he borrowed from the camera that made the craft accessible to the masses for the first time. The Kodak roll-film camera, released in 1888, was designed for 100 exposures per film — the number of shots that the most ambitious photographers at the time might take in a year. McLean's exhibit, which consists of 96 shots a day after editing, covers every inch of wall in Open Space.

"If it was going to be a comment on volume, it had to be something massive," he said.

From a distance, they exist like memory — a jumble of out-of-focus moments, with a few crisp images that stand out: A hanging towel, composed through several stacked images. A helicopter flying in and out of focus over 96 frames. If you look for them, you'll find photos of McLean's newborn son. Two months into the project, he learned his wife was pregnant, so the project became an unexpected documentation of that year of change — though it's not too prominent.

"The project took on a whole different level of significance for us," he said.

McLean, who studied media arts at NSCAD University (formerly the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design) and received his MFA from the University of Victoria, now teaches photography as media technologist at Camosun College.

He chose to pursue a life of photography while struggling through an English degree in his hometown of Lethbridge, Alta. One night in the library, he flipped through Erich Hartmann's In the Camps, documenting Eastern European extermination camps.

"I had never really thought about photography before that point as a way of communicating with other people," he said. But as he moved through the book, he was struck by the way the photos expressed something that he had been trying to capture through words. Finally, the last photo — an open door in the middle of the frame, with a grated window to one side spilling gridded light on the floor, and a child running out, made him change his course.

"It just, bang, it hit me," he said. "That was it, I closed the book and I signed it out from the library and I dropped out."

Since then, his work has been shown at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Vancouver's Contemporary Art Gallery and others.

"For 15 years, I've either thought about making pictures, or made pictures, or read about making pictures, or taught about making pictures," he said. "If there's anything that's ever going to really change my mind and make me say enough is enough, this was going to be it. But that didn't happen."

asmart@timescolonist.com