Three hundred and sixty-five days later.
When I decided to take up the Project 365 challenge, there were almost a dozen of us on a local message board who joined up. The goal was to take a picture every day for an entire year and upload it to a photoblog.
Most of us didn't complete the project. Of the original group, I think only four of us are still posting regularly. None of us posted a picture every day. And we all went off in different directions. A few people chose or happened upon a specific theme, such as nature pictures or their pets, and uploaded several pictures per day. My theme was simple, I thought. I wanted to try to capture through little vignettes what was going on in my life. I wanted to stick to the rule that I had to find just one picture to summarize a day. I worried that it was going to be hard to find interesting things to shoot. Wasn't my life pretty routine? How interesting was it going to be if all my pictures were about my commute, work, dinner, TV, and bed? Could I be 'authentic' and still be interesting?
My life changed quite a bit more than I expected this year, and that routine went away when I lost my job. Even so, the life of the unemployed can be even more routine and dull. There were many days when I couldn't imagine taking another picture of my coffee shop or house or desk.
This project was supposed to get me in the habit of carrying a camera everywhere. I have a small digital camera, but I still didn't remember to take it with me. Most of my pictures came from my iPhone, which was convenient but didn't have particularly good image quality. There were several days where pictures I wanted to take were just unusable because of the lighting or motion.
I decided to use Apple's iWeb software, part of the iLife suite. It does upload pretty seamlessly to the mac.com (now me.com) website, but the site itself is not very good. I'm sorry about that. I thought I would get around to improving it or porting it to a dedicated photoblog site, but I never got around to it.
Although I didn't get a picture for every day of the year, I was pretty consistent. I was most diligent in January (29 days) and February (21 days). After that, my rate dropped off to 16 in March and stayed around there for the rest of the year. August was the highest with 18 pictures, and September was the lowest with 11.
2008 was not a happy year for me, and I think you can see that in the blog. I was already concerned about my job situation when the year started. My fears were justified when I was laid off at the end of February. Throughout the rest of the year, travel for job interviews is a recurring theme. One without a happy ending, so far, although I have had promising interviews that might lead to a good position. Unfortunately, it's likely to be a position out of state, so one set of troubles will end while another set starts.
As I looked back at the photos I took, I was surprised how well they told the story of the year. The one thing that may be missing is people. I tried to mostly make this about me and what I was seeing, so friends and even family (except for my daughter, who is too adorable not to be constantly photographing) rarely make appearances. It's also easier to pause to take out a camera and shoot something when I'm alone.
From January through March, the pictures are mostly little glimpses of things in my life - my car, my office, my coffee shop, my lunch, shopping, going to the dentist, and, because I live in Minnesota, a lot of snow. (This became a big theme in March, when it snowed nearly every day and the winter seemed endless.) In early January, we went on a cruise vacation, so there's a varied set of vacation pics. In February, we remodeled our bathroom, so the obligatory before and after shots show up. I also made my one great prediction in February, when I took a picture of a gas station that had a price of $2.95. The gas station owner had put "WOW" underneath it. I predicted that we would really see WOW in the summer. That certainly was true. Although gas is around $1.60/gallon now, it flirted with $4.00 for most of the summer.
Although I was officially laid off on February 27, there's not much mention of it early in the blog. I visited an employment lawyer to help me negotiate my severance on March 13, and on March 20, there's a picture of cocktail hour food from a professional networking session.
In April, there are a few pictures of things I was selling on eBay, both to raise cash and kill time. It took a while for my job search to heat up, and I spent a lot of time just hanging out at home. On April 30, I blogged my first college visit, in Florida. Over the summer, I was interviewing all the time, and my pictures came from Chicago, Seattle, Florida, New York, Denver, California, and different schools in Minnesota. I tried to be discreet about where I was going and who was interviewing me.
My youngest brother was married in August. We were all in the wedding, so several pictures from summer show some of our involvement - Ellen's haircut and dress, the bachelor's party. At the end of summer, my car was rear-ended by a semi. Fortunately, the insurance covered it completely and the body shop was able to repair it.
My daughter turned 3 in September. The pictures later in the year show her as a more active, engaged child than those early pictures. She looks so much more older and alert in the later pictures. It's really quite striking.
In October, there was an interview in D.C. that led to a consulting project. Several more pictures were taken in D.C. as I spent a few weeks there. Then, amidst pictures of fall leaves, there was another flurry of interviewing - California, Missouri, Newark, New York, and Baltimore. By the time snow had started flying again and we were at Hanukkah and Christmas celebrations, the interviewing season was quieting down and I was finding it hard, again, to figure out what to take pictures of.
As this year comes to a close, I've signed an extended consulting contract with that school in D.C. I'll be there again regularly over the next few months. There are some more interviews and trips on my horizon, and hopefully, one will lead to the right job. I guess I miss that boring routine I was worried about - commute, work, home, sleep. Right now, that sounds pretty nice.
I haven't decided if I'm going to continue this photoblog. If I do, I will definitely want to move it to a more robust website, and possibly re-create the past entries to be easier to navigate.
As I said, 2008 was not a happy year. (That seems to be true for a lot of people in this country.) I am glad that I undertook this project and was able to finish it. Perhaps I'll photoblog 2009, in the hope that I will be able to tell a positive story with those pictures.
If you have read all of this and looked at some of my photos, please leave a comment below. And thanks for coming along for the ride.
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