Flashback: Year One

The very first Project365 photo.

Project365 was meant to be a one-time deal.
One photo a day for one year.

Before I started my own attempt, I saw so many people fail. In fact, I hadn’t seen anyone successfully complete the project until I was already about halfway through. (Whereas anyone = other participants in the Flickr group Project365.) Since that time, I’ve completed four full years and have started on the fifth.

I’ve recently started a much-needed project archiving all the captions on these photos, starting with Year One. I was naïve about the internet and photo asset management back then, and I only entered the captions on Flickr. With the recent closing of an old blog site (vox.com, run by SixApart) and the [allowed] loss of all my content [that I chose not to back up for personal reasons], I realized that I could potentially lose all context for the photos on my project if Flickr decided to shut down and I didn’t back up the captions manually.

In backing up these captions, I essentially re-lived every day of 2007. My brain hurt. And my heart hurt. It reminded me how long a year really is, no matter how fast or slow it feels when in the present. But most of all, I saw something in myself that I didn’t know existed. Buried among the weeks and months of technically low-quality photographs (compared to my standards now), there were gems of brilliance. I saw what I see in myself now – a photojournalist, trying to make sense of the world one picture at a time. One who wants to help the public remember that life is beautiful, even among the hardships we, as humans, endure.

I’ve always considered myself a photographer. It’s nice to know that my gut was right.

Check out Project365 :: Best of on Flickr. Right now it’s only selects from Year One. It will eventually grow to contain the best of all years.