I’ve been going through my Project 365 Flickr set, trying to get everything in order because my year is over.  It has been over for weeks now, but I’m just today uploading the last of the pictures, overwhelmed at the end by the flurry of activity and the blizzard of photos I’d taken.  I’ve gone through the entire set and located more than 15 days without pictures, but I can only remember forgetting to take photos on about 3 days, so I must have 1) not uploaded photos for those days, or 2) uploaded them but not sent them into the set, or 3) I really did forget to take a picture far more often than memory accounts for.

You can’t come to the end of a project like this without reflecting upon it.  It was wonderful in all the ways I’d hoped: prodding me to document the little moments, helping me become a better visual storyteller, and motivating me to be bolder in pulling out the camera.  It was hard in all the ways I’d expected, too: feeling like I was trapped some days with only blandness to document, or worrying that a photo showed a side of our lives or our house that I wasn’t feeling like sharing.

Going through all of them for housekeeping purposes revealed patterns in our lives and in the things I’m drawn to capture with my lens.

There were self-portraits

Project 365: self-portraits

and adventures

Project 365: adventures

and food

Project 365: food

and light and shadow

Project 365: light and shadow

and creativity

Project 365: creating

and learning
Project 365: learning

In the end, it is the little moments, easily forgotten, that make me most glad that I undertook this year-long documentation of our days.  Looking back through the photos I am sometimes startled by moments I’d cherished at the time but that were pushed out of my thoughts by the momentum of living.

Project 365: little things

I’m incredibly glad that I did Project 365 and will certainly be doing it again. This year, though, I need a bit of a break from daily obligation. I still want a creative focus on photography and I’m working on setting up another project, this time a collaborative one, and am really excited by the parameters that we’re creating. Hopefully I’ll be announcing it soon.

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