A New Year Begins

And so goes another year . . . seemingly twice as fast as the previous year. I just hate how fast time slips away, but I do enjoy the feeling of starting off a fresh new year. I know it’s silly because you can develop new habits any day of the year. For some reason, the start of new year always inspires me to change things and try to strive for some sort of self or life improvement. This year’s top goal is certainly to simply as many aspects in my life as possible and that is going to be a challenge.

In addition to trying to make my life easier, drink more water, take my vitamins, yada yada yada, I also want to try to do two fun little projects. The first one being a series of photographs of the backyard during the entire year - sort of like time lapse photography. I have an old, never used camera sitting on a tripod in our master bathroom. I plan to snap a shot every weekend throughout the year to watch the change of seasons and weather conditions. It will likely result in a pretty boring movie, but it’s something that I always wanted to do.

The second project is much more of an undertaking and, just like any New Year’s resolution, it’s bound to fall by the wayside. I am going to strive to take one photograph per day for 365 days. I got this idea several months ago and have been pondering it. Then I read about something similar in a photography magazine. It was called Project 365 and it was really meant to improve your photography craft. I have no intention of trying to create a work of art every day. All I want to do is capture on single snap shop (mostly with my camera phone, no doubt, since it’s always with me) and that snapshot is meant to be my visual clue to remind me of something that I did that day. Some days may be fun and interesting, while other days I may be snapping a picture of my computer screen, my office at work, or maybe even the Big Y parking lot. Yeah, not all days are very memorable. But that’s OK. It’s still my life, exciting or not.

So I woke up this morning and my first thought was, “Oh crap. I forgot to take a picture yesterday.” How’s that for a great track record? I managed to miss the very first day of my big photo project. Good grief. But that’s OK, because technically speaking I took hundreds of pictures on New Year’s Eve (after midnight at a party) so that will count as my January 1st picture taking. Lord knows I have a million shots to remind me of that special occasion. More on that soon. It’s a long story in and to itself and it will have to wait to later in the week to be recorded.

The year has been a lot of work so far, playing with and processing all the photos that I took on New Year's Eve. I think it's time to take a break and enjoy the next couple of days off. It's time to visit with Jessica, hang out, relax, and chew some bones. Be back again soon . . .