I’ve been busy all day with work and college, so haven’t had
time to write anything until now. It’s
bedtime, but I can’t go to that happy place until I’ve written my 500
words. This is not the only project I am
taking part in this year. I’m also doing
project 365, although this year it’s project 366 because it’s a leap year. In case you aren’t aware of what that is, it’s
when you take a photograph each day of the year and post it on the social media
platform of your choice. I’m posting
mine to Instagram and Facebook. So far I
haven’t missed a day. I’ve come close a
few times, like today when nothing interesting happened and it’s nearly over,
so I’m desperately looking around the house for something that could be vaguely
worth photographing that might look at least pretty if not particularly
interesting. Funnily enough, just a few
seconds after I’d posted today’s meagre offering, one of my friends commented that
she loved it. Just goes to show that you
don’t know what is really going to be appealing to people.
Whilst I’m doing this, I’m keenly aware that people could
very quickly become bored if I keep taking photos of my dogs and my beloved
grandson, so it’s quite a challenge to find new things, which I suppose is part
of the point of the project in the first place.
It challenges you to open your eyes and look around. It challenges you to look at your world with
different eyes and appreciate the small things just as much as the big
things. My photos so far have varied
between a simple plate of toasted crumpets with peanut butter on them, to an
old wooden pier on one of my favourite beaches on a sunny day.
My drive to work produces some lovely morning scenes, but I’m
always in too much of a rush to stop and take a picture of them. The motorway I have to get to is up a hill,
and on these cold winter mornings when there has been fog around, I’ve reached
the M65 to find bright sunshine and a blue sky and looking back into the valley
you can see a beautiful blanket of fog covering the ground for quite a few
miles. Of course it would be completely
illegal for me to stop on the hard shoulder just to take a photo of this, and I
fear that I may never capture the scene.
While I’m typing this, I’m formulating a plan that might help me get
this elusive shot, but it will involve a combination of the perfect foggy
morning and me getting up particularly early in order to drive to a good spot
with legal parking before the fog clears.
Something tells me this may not happen, as I love my bed and usually
wait until the last possible minute to part from it each morning.
At the end of the year, my plan is to get all of them
printed in a photobook so that I can easily look back on 2016 and hopefully
remember where and why I took each one of them.
Here are a couple of my favourites so far.