As if I didn’t have enough to do… as if I weren’t still recovering from the project of reviewing all my photos of 2008 in order to put together the Christmas newsletter… along comes Project 365 to pique my interest!

Project 365 itself is actually not new, I’ve learned, but I hadn’t heard of it until I learned about a popular, now-sold-out-and-being-sold-at-scalper-prices-on-eBay scrapbooking kit to help you with the project and now I am intrigued and ready to jump in. Because, you know, I don’t have enough on my plate!

In a nutshell, Project 365 is about taking a photo a day, every day, for a year. The idea is that you will capture those subtle nuances of life and come out of the experience richer for it — you may even learn something about yourself. Read more about it on Photojojo. Their idea is that you will post photos to a blog or to a photo site like Flickr. Meanwhile, savvy scrapbook manufacturers have decided this is a great way to sell scrapbookers MORE PAPER!!! Enter the ever-popular scrapbooking kit (which may go into a second printing), and because it is sold out, a free digital scrapbooking kit from Becky Higgins’ blog.

This is basically the old A Day In the Life of America project taken down to a very personal level.  And that intrigues me very much.  I take photos constantly — having two small children helps — so the challenge for me is not actually TAKING photos every day, but to narrow it down to a single photo to represent the day.  I’m joining the challenge late, but confident I have photos from every day and can quickly come up with something from my existing stash, but to move forward, consciously shooting a single representative photo will be interesting.  Take today — not an extraordinary day by any means.  Just a day of laundry, cleaning, getting things back in order.  What will my photo be today?  I could rush over and take a photo of my daughter’s neatly organized closet, because I spent hours sorting the laundry of all those tiny little outfits, making sure all the little tops and pants went back together, all the tights that matched the jumpers were back together, making sure everything was neatly put back in ROYGBIV order in the closet.  Or, I could use the photo of JavaGirl, being silly, wearing a princess hat, a candid photo JavaDad took with his cell phone.  Not a technically perfect photo, not representative of how we spent the greatest percentage of our day, but certainly a shining spot of the day — our princess, dancing around her room, enjoying her new princess bling given to her this Christmas.

Or I could go an entirely different path and just use something entirely random — a photo of some inane object d’art in our home.

Really, how does one sum up a day in a single photo?   How would you sum up yours?

Every year I go through the process of looking through our photos and trying to pick out the ones that best summarize our year (and I typically go with pics of the kids b/c I hate photos of myself… JavaDad sometimes is in them, sometimes not) and it’s always so interesting to me to see what we’ve done over the year.  I forget a lot of things.  And I notice themes that I didn’t notice while they were happening (the year we went to a lot of aquariums, for example).  So this should be an interesting project, it actually makes me excited to scrapbook again.

Because I am currently keeping my children’s faces off this site and they are most likely going to be frequent subjects of mine, I will not be posting my Project 365 photos here, but I thought you might enjoy some links to some other people’s projects as well as some variations of the original idea.  I’m listing some products to help you with your Project 365 — I have no affiliation with these manufacturers and know nothing more about these products than what they say on their pages.

Get started on your own Project 365 and I’d love to see your photos, if you are willing to share! 

• Stuck for ideas — here’s a list of themes: http://miaspearls.blogspot.com/2009/01/hooked-on-lysekil.html
• People have expanded on the idea on this site: http://citydailyphoto.com/portal/index.php
• Barb is taking the challenge to show off images of her town: http://discoverpa.blogspot.com/
• Here’s a Flickr group of Project 365ers — some awesome shots here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/project_365/
• This is actually a variation of the idea, but I thought this was so cool — this person decided to come up with something creative (a poem, a song, whatever) each day: http://www.billwadman.com/365/explanation.htm
• See how Project 365 has been used as part of community service: http://www.nationaltownwatch.org/nno/project365.html
• This web site is sort of a blog meets photo site meets calendar: http://www.shuttercal.com/
• A digital kit for a calendar for your photos: http://www.designerdigitals.com/ecom/product_info.php/products_id/5931
• And you can find lots of people to talk to about the project, at least from a scrapbooking/digital scrapping/blogging perspective at the Scrapbook Addict Scrapper Talk message board.  (And yes, I do know the owner of this site — but get no compensation from her for mentioning it — I just am a frequent lurker there!)

Happy New Year!