project 365

**The following article was written by guest contributor, Gina Miller.**

Throughout the entire year you’ll be creating a detailed scrapbook of sorts. For very little effort (you are probably going to take lots of pictures throughout your year anyway!) you will get an amazing snapshot of your year at the end. Time moves surprisingly fast. I bet there were lots of little things you did this past year that you’ve already forgotten. As a bonus, this project will help make you a better photographer. I’ll go ahead now and bet by year’s end you’ll be out of automatic mode.

TIPS:

1. Take your camera along. Some people take their camera everywhere. I don’t. But I do take it many, many places (just ask my family. They love it. Or not.)

2. Don’t get frustrated or feel too far behind to continue if you miss a day of taking a photo or you’re a week behind with uploading. Some weeks I was nearly 10 days behind but I knew I had my photos taken so I didn’t sweat it. You’ll find the time to catch up. I promise. Just keep going!

3. If you miss a day, NO BIG DEAL. There were a small handful of days I didn’t have anything interesting to shoot or was just too tired, etc. Make up for it the next day. In the grand scheme of things, being a day off isn’t a big deal.

4. If you have an amazing photo and then a so-so photo that represents your day more, don’t feel pressured to use photo #2. I did this as a way to keep a mini scrapbook BUT it was also very much a photography exercise for me. So if we went to the movies and I have a group picture from that but I also took a photo of Grace with amazing catch lights in her eyes that I was in love with, I used that one. In the end, you want to look at your album and be 110% excited with it. Some people like to represent every aspect of their day in one entry. I don’t. I know I still have the other photos to prove where I was & what I did. In the end, I wanted 365 photos in my album. No more. No less.

5. Vary your subject matter. If I took a couple of photos of inanimate objects for two or three days in a row (cookie dough from a cookie-baking day, a pair of new shoes, etc) I would make sure to take a people-picture for the following entry. While I enjoy playing with settings and editing photos of nature, for me, photos with people in them are more interesting to look at down the road.

6. Make sharing EASY. I can guarantee right now you are setting yourself up for an epic fail if you try to get too crazy with how you plan to share your photos. Are you going to scrapbook each and every one as you take them? Some people can get this done but I can’t. It’s a lot of added work. I shared my photos two ways throughout the year. I kept a password-protected album linked off of my Blog. This was very easy and it’s my most completed album since it contains my journaling. TypePad offers you the option of creating a plain album -or- they have a nifty calendar template. For me, the plain album was ideal. I wasn’t crazy about the calendar only because I liked having a no-comment field. I didn’t want to give people the option to comment on my photos. But hey, that’s just me. I also kept an album at SmugMug with the dated photos. Some people keep albums within their Facebook accounts as well. I started the year doing this but ditched it by March. But again, it’s another option as is FlickR.

7. If you find this project to be too daunting, why not try Project 52? Some people take one photo a week and use that to document their year. That’s always an option.

The only one single thing I can think that I may do differently in 2010 is to not give my photos a title. There were a handful of days where I just didn’t have a good title but felt I had to use one to keep everything in a similar format. But that’s a small detail. Aside from that, I am really happy with the way my project turned out!

Here’s a sampling of how my entries look w/in my TypePad album:

photo a day