A Year in Photos

My friend Misty is starting a new project, and I am going to join her! Granted, some of it will be under the ruse of wanting a new DSLR camera for my birthday. Until I hopefully get my birthday gift, I'll have to use my phone's camera and my point & shoot. Prepare for poor quality photos taken with little skill!

Project 365 has recommendations and tips on chronicling your life in daily photos. I've put some of the tips below, but you should also check out their site. I'm hoping by doing this that I can improve my mad photography skillz (which are really bad), keep a daily journal of sorts, share things with my family and friends, and have more photos to scrapbook. Gosh, if we actually get pregnant and have a baby this year, I could have some great photos to share!!

I thought of starting a new blog for my project, but I just don't have the time/energy/desire/skill to manage my two blogs + my class' blog + our website + my website for school + my school's website. See what I mean? Instead, my friend Megan turned me on to Shuttercal. It's so cool! Your photos are easy to upload and show like a calendar. Fun! It will take me a while to get used to it, but it seems easy so far.

Why don't you JOIN ME? If you do, let me know. I'll need ideas and inspiration!


Here's the info I pulled from the Project 365 website:

WHY DO IT?
Taking a photo a day is a big undertaking with big payoffs. Here are just a few reasons why you should consider doing it:

Imagine being able to look back at any day of your year and recall what you did, who you met, what you learned… (Often we find it hard to remember what we did just yesterday or even last night, let alone a whole year ago!)


Your year-long photo album will be an amazing way to document your travels and accomplishments, your haircuts and relationships. Time moves surprisingly fast.

Taking a photo a day will make you a better photographer. Using your camera every day will help you learn its limits. You will get better at composing your shots, you’ll start to care about lighting, and you’ll become more creative with your photography when you’re forced to come up with something new every single day.

TIPS ON HOW TO DO IT

6 Tips on How to Do It....

1. Bring Your Camera Everywhere
Yes, everywhere. Get in the habit. Grocery stores, restaurants, parties, work, and school. Going to a movie theatre? Snap a pic of the flick with your phone–there are photo-ops everywhere. If you have one of those tiny tiny cameras, you have no excuse not to have it in your pocket all the time. And if you don’t? Camera phones are a great substitute.


2. Make Posting Easy
You can install blog software like Movable Type or Wordpress on your own site and create an entry for each photo, but for true ease of use, try a photo sharing site. Flickr will let you post a week’s worth of photos in 2 minutes flat, and fotolog and Photoblog are geared toward a photo-a-day workflow. Making it fast and easy means you’re much more likely to do it.

3. Vary Your Themes
Try to capture the day’s events in a single photo. Perform photographic experiments. Take a photo of someone new you meet, something you ate for the first time, or something you just learned how to do. Take a photo of something that made you smile. And don’t forget to take a photo of yourself at least once a month so you can remember how you’ve changed, too.

4. Tell a Story
Use your blog entry, or your photo description, to explain what’s going on in each day’s photograph. How good did that dinner taste? What made you want to take a photo of that stranger? It’ll help you remember down the road, and it gives friends following along a better appreciation of why you took the photo you did. You don’t need to write a lot, just enough to add some color.

5. Don’t Stop, No Matter What
This is perhaps the most important tip of all. You will get tired of taking a photo every single day. Some days, you will consider giving up. Don’t. The end result is worth the effort. Remind yourself why you wanted to do it in first place.

There will be times you’ll think there’s nothing interesting left to take a photo of, and times you’ll think you didn’t do anything exciting enough to take a photo of. There’s always a great photo to be made.

Get out of the house and take a walk. Or stay inside and look around. Take a photo of something important to you. Take a photo of the inside of your house so you can see how your taste has changed over the years. Take a photo of anything, just don’t stop.

N.b. It helps if you’ve told your friends about the project and asked them to follow along. Their encouragement will keep you going!

6. Post early, post often
Plan on going through and posting your photos at least once a week so you don’t get backlogged and feel overwhelmed. Ideally, post every day or two. Again, spend the time up front to make sure it’s quick and easy to post. It’ll make all the difference.