coxy's blog

So, Ramunas passed on this idea to me. It's quite simple. What you do is take a photo every single day for the next 365 days (that's a whole year!). You then upload it to the web.

I'm going to give it a shot (no pun intended); I always have a camera on me - be it my polaroid, my D70 or even my cameraphone. I'll be collecting the results in this album. You can get automatic updates with the photocast RSS feed.

WHY DO IT?

Imagine being able to look back at any day of your year and recall what you did, who you met, what you learned… (Often we find it hard to remember what we did just yesterday or even last night, let alone a whole year ago!)

Your year-long photo album will be an amazing way to document your travels and accomplishments, your haircuts and relationships. Time moves surprisingly fast.

Taking a photo a day will make you a better photographer. Using your camera every day will help you learn its limits. You will get better at composing your shots, you’ll start to care about lighting, and you’ll become more creative with your photography when you’re forced to come up with something new every single day.

HOW TO DO IT

Bring Your Camera Everywhere
Yes, everywhere. Get in the habit. Grocery stores, restaurants, parties, work, and school. Going to the cinema? Snap a pic of the flick with your phone! There are photo-ops everywhere. If you have one of those tiny tiny cameras, you have no excuse not to have it in your pocket all the time. And if you don’t? Camera phones are a great substitute.

Make Posting Easy
Making posting photos fast and easy means you’re much more likely to do it. Personally, I recommend you grab yourself an album at Opera Community (that's this website). You can even enable MMS posting by ticking a box when you start your album. If you do that, you get an email address which you can save in your mobile phone. When you take your photo, you can send it straight from your mobile to that address as a picture message. Cool, eh?

Vary Your Themes
Try to capture the day’s events in a single photo. Perform photographic experiments. Take a photo of someone new you meet, something you ate for the first time, or something you just learned how to do. Take a photo of something that made you smile. Don't think that you have to take just one photo each day - you could take 20 and pick the best one. And don’t forget to take a photo of yourself at least once a month so you can remember how you’ve changed, too.

Tell a Story
Use your blog entry, or your photo description, to explain what’s going on in each day’s photograph. How good did that dinner taste? What made you want to take a photo of that stranger? It’ll help you remember down the road, and it gives friends following along a better appreciation of why you took the photo you did. You don’t need to write a lot, just enough to add some color.

Don’t Stop, No Matter What
This is perhaps the most important tip of all. You will get tired of taking a photo every single day. Some days, you will consider giving up. Don’t. The end result is worth the effort. Remind yourself why you wanted to do it in first place.

There will be times you’ll think there’s nothing interesting left to take a photo of, and times you’ll think you didn’t do anything exciting enough to take a photo of. There’s always a great photo to be made.

Get out of the house and take a walk. Or stay inside and look around. Take a photo of something important to you. Take a photo of the inside of your house so you can see how your taste has changed over the years. Take a photo of anything, just don’t stop.

It helps if you’ve told your friends about the project and asked them to follow along. Their encouragement will keep you going!

Post often
Ideally, post every day or two. Sometimes you won't manage to - but make sure you keep your photos to upload at the end of the week. You'll regret it if you miss a day out.

EXAMPLES

If you are taking part in Project 365, send me a link and I'll put it in this section:

1. babox
   
2. Deathfragger
   
3. Dudley
   
4. fristedt (archive)
   
5. galadriel
   
6. garydenness
   
7. GonsioR
   
8. green_head
   
9. hajai
   
10. honeybe
    
11. javaman
    
12. joblue84
    
13. Mafer
    
14. Maya.Maya
    
15. meagannichole
    
16. musickna
    
17. Ramunas
    
18. senicyang
    
19. shadowk
    
20. swapnil_s
    
21. SysBus
    
22. Tierheimfotograf
    
23. tinhoy
    
24. Trauerwald
    
25. Veronica0406
    
26. volkuro
    
27. wickedlizard
    
28. Words
    
29. Yojimbo
    
30. Yorch
    
31. zambuddy
    
32. zen4life
    
33. zhen0ayanamist