Day One

I am grateful for all we have. I am apprehensive about what's to come in 2025. Jeremiah and I have decided to capture it all by starting another 365 project.

There's so much in my life to look forward to, and so many moments to capture. I'm now flying home from a 10-day trip to Mexico, where we took took the kids to see the wilderness, experience the ocean, and become our translators while we all experience Mexican culture.

I want to remember these moments, because I know my days of being a mom to young children are numbered.

Jer and I have tried 365 projects a few times before. The last time was in 2014, when I made it 2 weeks. The most successful attempt was in 2010, when I kept going all way until October, and somehow gave up just after our wedding on 10/10/10.

I look back on that year with such fondness - working together, playing together, biking though the city together to hit a brew pub or a movie, with cameras always by our sides. We didn't even have smart phones to fall back on!

It's likely that having this 'project' over our heads encouraged us to find new adventures in order to avoid finding ourselves taking snapshots of a tea kettle at 11:30PM. And it's a fact that my memories of these early adventures are more vivid because I made the effort to take note of what was going on in our lives.

Sometimes it makes me sad to realize that we ended our 365 habit just we officially started our lives together, and I've let over fourteen years slip by. In that time, we've moved twice, traveled often, and raised two amazing kids - now 11 and 9. I have, of course, captured the big moments, but I've missed out on so many of the moments that seem unimportant at the time, but make all the difference when it comes to connection and meaning in day-to-day life.

I am already trying to prepare myself for failure. But what if I work on preparing myself for success? Here are a few of my goals and plans:

• This is for me. I don't need to have the best photos, I just need to stay on top of making something. The meaning is in the process, not the results. Technical excellence is great, snapshots are fine too.
• I am working on my skills. I bought a new camera last year, and I'm very happy with it, but it can be very frustrating to manage the auto-focus engine, especially when I'm going after kids and animals. Practice makes progress!
• I am building a workflow. A primary goal is to get past the 'photo black hole' – taking a ton of photos, realizing I don't want to cull and edit them all, and allowing the backlog to grow so big that I feel I don't 'deserve' to take any more. I want to streamline all of it.
• New photos are best, old edits are fine too. As part of cleaning up my workflow, I can post edited albums or special memories instead of falling back on something perfunctory.
• I'd like to call myself a photographer. I don't know exactly what this will take. I've tried on this label a few times, and never feel I am worthy of such a title. What can I do to get past my own gatekeeping, here?