My final day of photo projects is here! Thank you all for your sweet comments, I've had such a fun time putting this week together, I hope you've had an equally good time getting some new ideas for your photo-taking projects.
New team member Marie Taylor agreed to participate in a month long project of black and white photos. She was already planning on doing a photo-a-day, so she said this would be easy. She explains:
I did this photo-a-day because we had a lot of big events and big changes with Lily graduating and the big recital. But it's funny-I'm not generally a big moment scrapper, or a big moment photographer. I love the normal. I love the everyday. I am someone with a terrible memory-and I mean terrible. I forget the details-things that make my life what it is. Funny things my kids say, toys they play with, certain poses Lily will do over and over, developmental milestones that go by so fast they can so easily be forgotten. And then there are the big things. Recently my two-year-old Charlie fell and ended up having to have his front tooth pulled. He is fine now-still recovering, but fine, but my sweet little boy has lost his baby tooth very, very early. In time I'm sure it will become him, the norm, but right now, I am so very glad I was focusing on capturing him-capturing that perfect smile. (Can you tell this Mama is still very sad?) I guess this is yet another reminder that things can change slowly over time that you may not notice the change, or they may change in an instant and the best way to remember it all is to just take pictures.
Our Aussie WCS team member, Jody Dent-Pruks signed up for my request and offered up her own idea: a month of dinners. She also suggested a month of portraits of her boys (see Monday's Project 365 Kids link in the bonus section), but when she said dinners, being someone who enjoys food, how could I pass that one up? I'm sure her boys are very handsome and all, but...
I'll let Jody describe the project in her own words:
Taking the photos was easy...I did 365 last year so I fell back into that daily routine very easily. I usually plate up the family meal at the kitchen bench in the same spot each night, so just before I took the food to the table, I snapped a photo.
I can honestly say that I did not do things differently just because I was documenting it...no point in pretending we eat another way; no fun to look back on food fads we may of had at the time (um, at the moment we love anything mexican LOL). This is our everyday food, and how I serve it up each night.
On reflection I thought the meals, as a group, did not look colourful enough. I work full time, I get home around 5.30 6.00pm and I can guarantee that the boys are all “starving” and need food NOW! As a result I do a lot of one pot meals, hiding those pesky vegetables like any good mama would! It is also winter here in Australia so we are not eating as many salads and bbq’s; now it’s time for the soups and stews!
OK, the voyeur in me loved seeing what Jody and her family eats every night for a month, anyone else notice the pancakes with ice cream?
Then, like any good scrapper would, Jody took her collage and turned it into a layout. The journaling is just a recap of each day's menu. How easy is that? The best part? Read Jody's last statement to find out (I'll highlight it for you, just in case):
What’s not to love about being able to include a lot of information in a small space. Now page after page of photos of our dinners would get a little...boring. This collage brings similar elements together and gives it much more impact when viewed at the same time. A double page layout will fit just fine in my scrapbook.
When I look at a month of meals like this it says a lot about our family. There is not a lot of red meat because I don’t eat it. Of course I add a some meat each week but it doesn’t dominate and the boys have learned to embrace chicken like I do!!
Sometimes lunch is so big that dinner is very light, or in the case of Mother’s Day the dessert we couldn’t fit in became dinner.
You can have the occasional junk food (McDonalds) and still have a balanced diet.
Breakfast for dinner is fine by our family.
And finally...thank goodness for pasta!!!!!!
So thanks Emily, a totally doable project and a nice slice of family life.
My final contributor is another new member, Donna Jannuzzi. Her project and comments really hit a chord for me. She's in the middle of a move to a new home. She has two sweet little boys and a husband to transition. I told her she didn't have to do this project for the blog, but she put together something that ended up having just as much impact as the other contributors' projects because it's really honest.
Here are Donna's thoughts on her project:
I was extremely distracted at the time of this project with all of the details of our move (which is why there aren't too many photos in the collage; I didn't take many to start with). But, I did enjoy this project. Basically, I thought of it as a practice-run since I have never done ADITL before but I do want to do it again once I can focus on capturing more of the details of our day and once we actually settle back into a routine. What I learned is that it is easy to be in the moment and observe the small things in life if you choose to. It is harder to stop though, and take the picture. Sometimes you have to just live life you know and not focus on recording it (like when things are stressful or out of the ordinary). And then other times, it's good to take note, to stop and write something down or grab the camera and take a picture. Obviously, as a scrapbooker I see the value in recording memories and moments. Hence the motivation to give this project another try.
I've done a couple of these ADITLs myself. For the first one, I stopped about 1/2 way through the day but decided to put together a page anyway. I turned all the photos blue, because I was doing it to fulfill an ad challenge as well. Kind of like Donna's project, it wasn't the full day like I'd originally intended, but I did capture things that make me remember that time in my life. I was mailing a layout to Simple Scrapbooks that day. :)
This next one I did last summer, about this time of year. It was a Thursday, I know that not from the date that I stamped, but from my piano students' pictures. They were my Thursday crew last year. Funny how pictures can take you right back to that day. For my background, I used a TTV stamp from Studio Calico, it reinforces the idea nicely.
More places to find ideas and articles on photo projects:
- photojojo/projects
- Digital Photography School (DPS) and search "photo project" there are 5 pages of ideas.
- Digital Photography Projects
- Books, including this one and the one from yesterday.
And there you have it. Was I right? Did you get a ton of ideas? And I didn't cover even 1/10 of what's out there. So have I described you? Are you a photo project junkie like me? I hope so! I want to sincerely thank all the WCSers who helped me this week. When I originally conceived this week, I was going to do a few projects myself and feature some of the things I've done in the past. I'm glad I decided to get help because there is more than one way to interpret each challenge. I appreciate how I gave everyone a basic set of directions and they took those and ran with them, turning the projects into their own and creating far more than I ever expected. I appreciate when they came back to me and asked if they could do this instead of this. Please take that as an example, there should never be any hard and fast rules when it comes to capturing your life. Seeing all the variety the girls came up with this week has been as inspiring as searching the web for projects. So thank you WCSers and thank you readers!
