The Great 30th Year Photo Project

#natalies365photoproject

Last year on my birthday (when I turned the big 3-0), I embarked on a year-long journey of taking one photo every day for the entire year. This wasn’t my first go-around with a 365 photo project; I did one when I first moved to New Jersey and started it on my 25th birthday. So naturally, when 30 was right around the corner (good grief, where did all that time go?), I thought it’d be great fun to do another 365 project! Well, it all came to an end this past week when December 13 rolled around (no seriously, where did the time go?).

When I was searching back through my Instagram photos to find what I had done the first time around, I couldn’t find anything because when I started the project in 2010…Instagram didn’t really exist yet. That’s right. Instagram was a whole lot of insta-nothing. I also had recently gotten an iPhone at that time, so the fact that I literally had a camera in my pocket made the prospect of a project like this all the more appealing.

Funnily enough, I wrote two blog posts about it: Project 365: NJ Style and…Project 365: NJ Style (wow girl, talk about a creative title failure). While social media, life, the world, me, among many, many other things, has changed immensely, the biggest challenge of this project still remained: Oh, crap, I STILL need a photo for today and it’s 11:34pm! 

But having Instagram and my own hashtag (#natalies365photoproject) made it all much more fun, despite those occasional late-night photo scrambles. I started the project doing mostly black and white photos just as a style thing, but after a short while I realized that some photos looked so great with a pop of color. So then I started dabbling in both. And for some unknown reason, Instagram tells me there are 368 photos with that hashtag…oops.

If you’re looking for a fun, new project that doesn’t take a lot of planning or resources, I’d highly recommend a 365 photo project. While some days are definitely harder than others (I mean, how many photos of my wacky socks and/or Connor can I really take?), you have all the freedom and creativity in the world to document whatever you want. Not to mention, it’s also a very cool memory to have (and Shutterfly connects to Instagram making for easy uploads when it’s time to make a photo book…just sayin). I can also definitely say that my creative photography and style has greatly improved in five years. Time to put the daily Natalie cam down till four years from now (though I am still doing the one second video of the day…stay tuned for that in the new year!).

This was no easy task, but I tried to narrow it down to my top 2-3 photos per month. If you click the hashtag in the 4th paragraph, you can see them all. Here are some of my favorites from the past year!