365

In the interest of not boring you with yet another recap of our stomach-bug infested lives (in a nutshell: Zach and I feel much better today, D's about the same), I figured I'd instead write about Project365. I've already been doing a project 365 for Donovan, taking a picture of him every day for his first year (well, attempting to, anyway. We're on day 357 but his 365 set on flickr only has 305 photos, but then again I think he was already a month or 2 old before I even decided to do this, so eh). Anyway, so this year I've decided to also do a 365 for 2009, taking a picture each day for all of this year, as a way to practice taking pictures of things other than my ultra-adorable son (I know, I know, imagine that!).

I'm already pretty used to using my camera each day to take pictures of D, but it's been interesting now adding to it the challenge of taking at least one picture of something else each day. I've also set a goal for myself to upload, sort, tag, edit, and upload to flickr my pictures at the end of each day, when they're still a manageable amount, rather than my previous method of letting them pile up for a good week or longer. So far I've been doing pretty well with it, skipping a day only a couple times. It helps that Lightroom is such great software, making it easy to tag and categorize the pictures and helping me feel more organized (even if it is a bit slow on our computer, which I think has more to do with the computer than anything).

I've already noticed a couple interesting effects of doing this project. One, knowing that I have to take at least one picture each day, I feel more ok taking pictures of things that would normally be considered more mundane, since I partially look at this project as a photojournal of sorts. Part of the goal is to record my life, events and things in it, and the little details are all part of that. Before I often felt like there really had to be something special to take a photo of, for some silly reason, and I'm realizing now that part of the fun of photography is finding these "mundane" everyday things and making them interesting through photography.

The other, is that before I've shied away from experimenting much with postprocessing of pictures mainly b/c I feel like I just don't have the time. I have a hard time just picking a few shots to decide to play with, and I don't want to go through every one, so I just don't do anything to any of them. And I do have a goal to make as many of my pictures great in-camera so that I don't need to do anything to them unless I want to. But, choosing one photo each day to be part of this project, gives me a single photo that I can spend even just 5 minutes tweaking, which has made me explore and feel more comfortable with the various editing tools in Lightroom. I've been working my way through Scott Kelby's Adobe Lightroom 2 book, and between that and playing with the different settings, and playing with pre-made presets and even trying to re-create them myself, I feel I'm learning a lot in a short time which is pretty exciting. It's good to know how to achieve certain effects when you feel a particular photo calls for them.

So, we'll see how this goes. Hopefully, well. I'm sure I'll have many days of feeling bored or completely uninspired, which hasn't been as much of a problem with taking pictures of D b/c, well, he could be just sitting there and (to me, at least) there's always an interesting/cute picture to be taken. I'm hoping this project helps open my eyes to all the other interesting photographic opportunities all around, also just waiting to be taken. I've been posting my 365 photos in a set on flickr, and also on a photoblog, for those who are interested in following along with me on this photo journey. ; )