Project 366

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.