Photography Projects.  Either you love ’em or you hate ’em.  I happen to love them. Over the last few years I’ve participated in a few.  For a while I did the Daily Shoot, which was fun for a while until I found the themes to be a bit repetitive.  I made an “ABC’s of my Travels” album once – an alphabetic journey through my international travels (Surprisingly enough, X and Z were easy but I had to get creative with Y).  Once I even did a mini-photo documentary of a sick day.  I also did a Project 52 (1 photo per week on a specific theme), which was fun because I did it with several photogfriends.  But my biggest project, the one I’ve been most serious about for the longest amount of time, is Project 365.  For over two years now, since the day Jay and I were engaged, I’ve been taking a picture a day without fail.  Yup, since July 12, 2010.  That’s 904 days.  Call me crazy but I’ve loved it for so many different reasons.  I love documenting one moment of every day, whether it be someone I saw, something I did, a place I visited, or simply a part of my daily life that would otherwise go unnoticed.  Not only that, but I’ve also connected with so many people thanks to my Project 365.  I have a small community of photogfriends on Facebook that I have gotten to know through our daily pictures.  Some of them I’ve never met before, and some of them are close friends but they all help to inspire me in some way.  Every day :-)  I also have to mention that Project 365 is the best thing you can do to grow as a photographer.  It motivates you to pick up your camera every day, learn how to use all of its features, and examine your work so that you can improve the quality of your pictures, your composition, your style, etc.

If you’re interested, you can view most of my pictures from Year One and Year Two++ on Flickr.  In case you’re wondering, I’ll explain why I don’t have a Year Three album.  Those of you who know me know I’m a stickler for organization.  I started Year One of Project 365 on July 12, 2010 and ended on July 11, 2011.  I made a book of my photos on Blurb and started Year Two right away.  Year Two ended right in the middle of our honeymoon so when I went to make the book I decided I couldn’t end a book in the middle of the honeymoon (I guess that makes me a Type A personality) so I decided to finish up the calendar year before I made my next book.  So I’ve been calling the project the “Daily Photo Project” and now that 2012 is almost over, that means I can finally get my second book of daily pictures printed, yay!!

Now, back to the reason for this post.  Recently, I heard about Project Life 365 and I immediately thought it was right up my alley!  An international community of photographers inspiring each other to take daily pictures?  Um, yes, please!!

I’ll be posting my Project Life 365 pictures on Instagram.  Follow me there for the theme-related pictures by searching for @idaliaphotography.  I’ll still be doing my Daily Photo Project and most of those pictures I’ll be posting on Flickr.  This will continue to be a collection of highlights of the people, places, and things from my daily life.  On “slow days” I’ll be posting my Project Life 365 pictures to both projects.  But for the most part I’ll be challenging myself to keep both projects separate.

I’m so excited for this project to start and I invite you all to participate!  I look forward to getting to know more of my clients through our daily pictures so I hope a lot of you take on the challenge; I promise it will be worth it.