Project 365

For all you Digital and Paper Scrapbookers, here is an awesome project my friend, Mandy has for you to try!

Project 365: Take a photo a day for one whole year. It sounds easy enough, right? Most people choose to start this project on January 1st. I put a spin on it and started it on my 29th birthday. I wanted to have a documentation of my last year of youth (ha!), so what better way to view my year than through pictures?

You can read more about this project here: http://photojojo.com/content/tutorials/project-365-take-a-photo-a-day/

I am happy to report that I completed this project! It wasn’t easy, and I wanted to quit at times. But I never gave up, and I have a GORGEOUS book to show for it. Here are some tips that I’d love to share with you to keep you going.

1) Keep it fun, not stressful! If you forget to take a photo one day, don’t just quit! Find something that represented yesterday, and snap two photos in one day. It’s okay to fall behind every once in awhile, but don’t get TOO far behind, because then it will seem daunting, and you will get stressed out. And that is bad.

2) Have a goal in mind, like a bound book. That is my goal with my project. No matter what you choose to do with it, think of your final project every day to keep you motivated! (Mine was printed at Shutterfly, but you can use any online photo gallery.)

3) Don’t feel like you have to scrapbook every picture, or even one scrapbook-y layout a week. Yes, I scrap some of the photos I take in my project. But since I print my blog book out every year, and I print a family album of all my scrapbook pages every year, I wanted this to be a book of just PICTURES. I don’t want colors, embellishments, or scrapping trends to get in the way of my life in pictures. This is supposed to be fun and not stressful, remember?

4) No pressure to upload your photos to your blog or flicker account – it’s for YOU, not everyone else. Again, why make it hard on yourself? Sure, it’s fun to upload and share the photos you’ve taken. But what counts in the end is how you documented your year, not what everyone thinks of your photos. Share your favorites, or share them all, but don’t let it get you bogged down so that you stop the project!

So you take a photo a day…now what? Here’s what I did…every week (or so) I emptied my camera. I opened up a week’s worth of photos (7) at a time. I edited them, and saved them with the name of the day (ie, January 6) and put them in a folder called (oddly enough!) “Project 365 Photos”. My page layouts are labeled by week (ie, Week 30) and are then put in a folder called “Project 365”. I had a set of page templates that I rotated throughout the year for book uniformity, but I’m a little OCD like that.
Now that my project is completed, I love looking through my book. It is amazing how those winter months seemed to drag by in real time, but they fly by in a matter of pages now. It’s also fun to see the little moments that I had forgotten all about, but I’m so grateful that I snapped photos of them at the time.

Mandy is a full-time mother of two beautiful girls. She has contributed to craftersguru in the past and has a love for digital scrapbooking.

Thanks Mandy for an awesome project!