Project 365 – taking a photo a day…

I first heard about Project 365 through a newsletter that I receive…from Photojojo…this newsletter has some great ideas…it is one of the things that comes into my inbox that I am happy to see!

Photography has always been a love of mine…I really fell in love with it when I spent 6 months cycling around Europe in ’79…that lead, a couple years later (after my first ‘half-degree’ from the University of Guelph in biological sciences), to my spending 2 years at Ryerson in Photographic Arts back in the early ‘80s…but that was also back when the travel bug had a pretty tight hold of me and so, after 2 years of a 4 year course, I wandered off again…travelling across Canada that time, ending up living in the Arctic (Inuvik) for a year and a half…then, somehow I ended up with a partner and twins…but that is another story…

I tried to do Project 365 in 2008, but wasn’t able, for a number of reasons to keep it up…it isn’t as easy as one would think…harder still when you expect to represent each day with a ‘good’ photograph!...you can’t just go out day after day and end up with a ‘good’ photograph without a fairly intensive commitment…I am thinking of trying it again for 2010 though…

I did participate in a ‘Day in the Life of…” project through WetCanvas…October 4th, 2008…on that date, everyone who had signed up for the project headed out and documented our day…there were people from all over the world participating…then we were to post on the forum a number of our pictures and from that choose 1 to represent the day…I took 84 photos total and whittled that down to 35 that I quite liked…it was hardest to choose the 1 to represent the day…it was one of those beautiful sunny, crisp, windy fall days…this is what I chose…














There are all kinds of neat projects out on the Net, for just about every kind of interest, that you can join in on…for free!…another one that I would like to participate in is the SketchCrawl…set dates for going out…in groups or alone…all over the world…just like a photographic “Day in the Life off…”…but sketching…I have wanted to do this one for a while…but never felt confident enough in my sketching skills to do it…but after my plein air class and in the spirit of continuing that aspect of my painting, I think I could now…I have no idea who I would go with though…I have never seen an Ottawa group…I could go alone…here is the forum for the next date coming up on November 21, 2009…the 25th World Wide SketchCrawl…

These projects are just one of the ways in which I keep my ‘inspiration well’ full…joining a project or group that requires me to create…be it through painting trading cards or postcards, taking photographs or just committing to be ‘Creative Every Day’, gives me a focus and the push to produce…to get out and photograph or go to my studio or outside to paint or draw…and that simple act…the just ‘doing it’ has an amazing power to get the creative juices flowing so that good things can happen…another thing I do is to fill myself regularly with ‘eye candy’…but blog surfing, researching artists, reading and going out to art shows…

Here are a few more photos from my 'Day in the Life of...' a year ago...