That’s A Wrap! 2022 Project 365

If you’ve been following along this past year, you know that I’ve embarked on a personal photo project called a 365. A 365 project is simply taking a photo each day for an entire year. Kind of self explanatory, right?

Now that we’re several weeks into 2023, how did things pan out and what did I learn?

Meeting The Goal

Did I meet my goal of taking a photo of my family each day? Short answer, no. But, I honestly got a lot further than I thought I would. I had a few factors that kept me from meeting the expectations that I had set for myself.

The goal was to only use my DSLR camera the entire year for this project. That started out well and great, but wasn’t always a convenient expectation. I would leave my camera out on my kitchen counter so that when a moment became an opportunity that it was ready to go. The only drawback; I didn’t always have it with me when we were out and about. It was at that point I would rely on my iPhone to fill in those gaps which didn’t always push me as creatively as it could have.

Fall for me is bananas! Come September, when I’m neck deep in my school portrait season, it becomes a survive situation. Every year that I’ve done one of these projects and I’m working on our photo books, I always see a steep decline in both the amount of my photos, as well as the creativity of my shots. I’m personally tapped and it translates into being unmotivated to keep up.

I was an organized mess!!! I thought I had a solid plan going into the project in terms of how I was going to organize my photos, but once I added those iPhone images into the mix things all fell apart quickly. Not to mention that once fall season began, I got super behind on culling and editing my images.

I was tired of posting to Instagram and Facebook too. The goal was to hold myself accountable by posting my daily images to social media, but even that became too much. Halfway through the year I had super strong convictions about my social media use and simply decided that I was going to avoid it at all costs the remainder of the year.

Going Forward

Even though I didn’t stick with the plan , I’m extremely proud of the images I collected for my family. I do plan to attempt this project again going into 2023, but I’m going to do things differently.

First, I’m not going to rely on only using my DSLR exclusively. I’m going to brush up on my iPhone camera skills to make those shots just as important. I’m going to come up with a better system of organizing images coming from both sources and any other sources I plan to use (I got a Holga film camera for Christmas and plan to make that part of the rotation). And I’m not planning to share every image from this project on socials.

If you’d like to follow along with my Project 365 2023 I’ll do my best to post a few images of each month here. My hope and goal behind sharing is to encourage others to give this a go for themselves, no matter what your skill level. You don’t have to be a professional photographer in order to collect a year’s worth of images of your family. If you have a sincere desire to chronicle your year, you can! And I’m happy to help encourage you along the way. Please reach out if you have questions or need advice on how to do this for yourself.

If your desire is to chronicle your family through the year, but you’re just not interested in doing it yourself, consider signing up for one of my Year In The Life memberships. It’s a great way to take the stress off yourself while still making a year long collection of images for your family.