One year ago today I started a project: take at least one photo each day and post it online. Yesterday, I took the 365th photo in the project and today I compiled a video of the set:
I have found this to be an amazing experience and I’m going to continue with it. Setting aside a few moments each day to look around and find something worthy of a photo adds a very interesting and nice component to everyday life. Like Chris, I’ve started noticing things I never saw before. Looking back at the full set is also a great reminder of all that I’ve been up to over the last 12 months.
I highly recommend a hobby of this sort. I have two pieces of advice. First, it’s helpful to have a small enough digital camera that you can take it with you everywhere. You never know when a great photo opportunity will present itself. Second, don’t expect to maintain a separate blog or even blog section for this (as I naively did), it’s hard to find the time for that. Rather, post the photos to a community photo-sharing site like Flickr that makes posting and organization easy and can connect you to a group of people engaging in a similar project.
I want to send a shoutout to folks on Flickr who’ve been participating in this concurrently. A great community has built up around the project, which has been another great aspect of all this.
{ 8 comments }
Dan 10.24.07 at 8:10 pm
That was (bizarrely) compelling viewing. What an amazing way to describe what happened in a year without any of the usual narrative acoutrements of what happened to who.
I wonder if, when you watch this in ten year’s time, every single picture will still link back to a memory for you? (Probably: it worries me sometimes how much detail our brains keep about our day to day activities – like the exact seats I sat in the last three times I was in any particular public place…)
Chris Bertram 10.24.07 at 8:46 pm
Nice to see some of those shots again! I’ve still got a little way to go. In fact it is 2145 and I still haven’t done my duty ….
dave heasman 10.24.07 at 10:03 pm
“I want to send a shutout to folks on Flickr”
A shoutout might be more gratefully received..
Eszter 10.24.07 at 10:29 pm
Thanks, Dan, viewing these photos definitely reminds me of all sorts of positive experiences that otherwise I would not think about. It’s nice.
Chris, you seem to do very well regardless of hour of the day so I wouldn’t be worried.:)
Dave, thanks, fixed.
Rob 10.24.07 at 10:30 pm
Hi Eszter,
Nicely done. You might want to check out this site as well:
http://ssad.bowdoin.edu:9780/projects/daily_post/
Mike has been taking a photo a day for over five years now and posting it on the web. Funnily enough you and I overlapped at Princeton, and now Mike and I are colleagues at Bowdoin… Small world!
Matthew Gordon 10.24.07 at 10:36 pm
Hooray! Passover at my place made it into the project (#160, 2:43). Any other strangers in a strange land (e.g. Stanford or the bay area at large) who need an invite to this year’s “Passover for reform, mostly lapsed and/or non-observant Jews” is welcome.
Eszter 10.25.07 at 2:29 am
That was a great Passover at your place, Matt, highly recommended.:)
Rob, that’s interesting 5xProject 365, that’s serious! Bummer though that it’s not on a community site.
millie wink 10.28.07 at 7:49 pm
Cool project, me want to try. But how do you get them all together like that into a video? Does the Flicker site offer a way to do that?
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