An old blog, a new project

Sheesh, as if two birthdays in one week weren’t enough excitement, there’s more! First of all, today is my first day back at work after my year of maternity leave. More on that some other time, because there’s still more!

Can you believe that four years ago today, I wrote my very first blog post? Yowza! And here we are, more than 1,300 posts and 18,000 (!!!!) comments later, still going on about not much in particular and everything in general.

As if all that weren’t enough, I’m taking the occasion of my blogiversary to tell you about a secret project I’ve been working on for the last little while. Back in November, I was listening to archived podcasts of the CBC radio program Spark. In one particular podcast, they were talking about a guy who took a Polariod a day every day for years; from March 31, 1979 through October 25, 1997. Listening to it tweaked memories of having seen something similar on the web, and when I went looking I found a couple of sites talking about Project 365, the idea of taking one photo per day for an entire year and posting it to the web.

The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to try it. I mean, you know, I don’t have anything else on my plate right now, right? *grin* And hey, I’ve made it all the way through 11 of 365 days already; how much harder could it get?

My own rules of the project are fairly simple. A photo must be taken every day, but I can slip a little bit on the posting of them. I really want to expand my subject repertoire beyond the boys, and to learn to look at things and ‘see’ them in a new way. And I want to include at least one self-portrait every month or so.

I’ve been toying with ways to show you my pictures. I was thinking of a separate gallery on the blog, or even a separate photo blog. Rather than make extra work for myself, though, I think I’ll just keep uploading them to Flickr. You can see the most recent pix under “Project 365” over there in the sidebar, and I’ll make a post of my favourites each week. And you can see the full set on Flickr, including the captions, explanations and other random thoughts that accompany each photo.

Here are my favourites so far:
2:365 Peek!4:365 Club soda8:365 Lucas in the morning light10:365 Sunlight, snow and shadow11:365 Coloured pencils

(Click on any of the thumbnails to see them full size on Flickr.)

And this is one of my new all-time fave photos. I love the reflection of both Lucas and I in the collander!

5:365 Lucas and me in the colander

Funny, but I am already seeing how this project is getting into my brain. Just like I used to often see the world around me in terms of blog fodder, now everywhere I look I feel like I’m looking through the lens and scanning for photo opportunities!

Author: DaniGirl

Canadian. storyteller, photographer, mom to 3. Professional dilettante.

13 thoughts on “An old blog, a new project”

  1. I love this idea! And the photos are great – keep up the creativity! I was/am quite the photographer myself and love a good shot. You must have a nice camera…

    by the way…where are you? up in POREAD as we discussed?

  2. Great pictures so far – I love this idea, but I know it wouldn’t work for me. I’d do it for 5 days and then forget. Good for you – keep it up, just 353 more days to go!

  3. I love this project and your photos thus far.

    I remember listening to that show on Spark last year. I think we were driving back on a long weekend from far, far away. It was so touching and amazing. I can’t remember how long he did this – and with a polaroid at that – but it was quite neat how his friends brought it online and the impact it had.

  4. Great stuff! A lot of the 365 projects I’ve seen have been all self-portraits and I find those can get boring really fast unless the photographer is interested in creating fictional stuff. I think your approach is a lot more fruitful. Off to make you a contact on flickr…

  5. Pingback: Project 365: Fini!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *