A Year in Pictures

Last summer, my friend Dave proposed a photo group. Anyone who wanted to join would take a photo every day for a year, from September 1, 2009 through August 31, 2010, and post it on Flickr. Dave's a pretty popular blogger and twitterer, so he attracted a pretty far-flung group of mostly strangers. Well, strangers to me, I suppose it's possible he knew all of them, but I don't think so. I knew a few of them in real life before we started, and met a couple more on a photo-taking trip to Roosevelt Island (I wish we'd done more of those), but mostly I spent a year communicating with these people through photos and the occasional comment. It was fun to see different people's approaches to the project, and get this weird peek into their lives. We did some theme days here and there, but there was no structure to the project, which was nice. One woman took a picture of her baby every day. Lots of us cooked a lot. I saw some beautiful sunsets and sunrises.

I've always liked taking photos, though I'm no expert and have no desire to be one. I think I have a pretty good eye, and I like the results I get with my little Sony point-and-shoot. I always say I should carry my camera with me more, but I never did it. I liked having a bit of structure to my photo-taking, though some days (especially near the end), it started to feel like homework I didn't want to do. It's a cliché, but it changed the way I looked at things. I looked up more, I noticed more things around me.

I think I only missed one day outright. I will admit I missed some other days but I posted photos from other days to make up for them. Yes, it's cheating, shut up! Considering how many people didn't make it through the year, I feel fine about my occasional reinterpretation of the rules. And for all the days when I took a hasty picture of the cat before bed, there were days when I took many photos and had a hard time deciding which one to post. Which explains why the final set has 372 pictures in it. (Two also got eaten in a weird iPhoto/Flickr sync glitch, mysteriously gone from both forever.)

With the year over, I made a list of what I thought were the trends (and one deliberate anti-trend) in my pictures. Today, as I counted, was the first time I'd sat and gone through all 365 (um, 372) photos. They form a neat little visual diary. There were a bunch I'd completely forgotten about. Most of the trends I identified were spot on, though some of the numbers were higher or lower than I expected, and as I looked I found a few more patterns. Some of my categories are a little arbitrary and so is my counting. But it seemed like a fun way to share some of my favorites here. (Click a photo to view full-size.)

• Photos of the cat: 27
  
  I thought there'd be way more of these!
  
  
• Photos of food (or drink): 60
  
  
  
• Photos of or taken from subways and subway stations: 31
  
  I thought there were more of these too!
  
  
• Photos of the NYC skyline or major landmarks: 28
  
  
  
  • Of those, photos of the Empire State Building: 10
    
    Not nearly enough of the Chrysler Building, which is actually my favorite, but I work really close to the ESB.
  
  
  
• Photos taken outside of NYC: 43
  
  This one surprised me too. I didn’t realize I'd spent so many days out of town!
  
  
  • Of those, photos taken outside of the US: 5
    
  
  
  
• Photos with people as the subject: 5
  
  (Okay, the weird-ass giant banana is really the subject of the second one.)
  
  
• Photos of ruined, crumbling or abandoned things: 9
  
  
  
• Attempted "artsy" close-ups of objects (not including food and cat porn above): 36
  
  
  
• Photos in or out the windows of my office: 18
  
  
  
• Photos of or out the windows of my apartment (where you can really see the apartment, so again not the food or cat porn – this was a weak category to choose!): 17
  
  
  
• Photos taken at work events: 4
  
  
  
• Photos of or in theatres: 14
  
  
  
• Photos taken into the sun: 16
  
  I thought there would be more of these. This is definitely a visual tick that I have.
  
  
• Photos of screens: 9
  
  
  
• Jokes or Puns: 5 (Mouse-over for captions)
  
  
  
• Photos taken with my phone: 6
  
  
• Photos I don't like: 12 (Pretty good, out of 372!)
  

And here are some more I really like that don't match any of the categories above:


Here's the whole set.

This was fun. Thanks to Dave and to everyone else in the group. One of the things I'd like to do as I try to blog more is post more photos (not quite this many!), so I'm hoping to keep carrying my camera and taking more pics. Just probably not every day.