It was my birthday a few weeks ago.
4 years ago on my birthday, I started what was supposed to be a 1-year-long project. I wasn’t even sure if I would make it through a whole year but having admired other photographers doing a Project 365 since about 2010, I decided to go for it and see how far I’d get.
Well, I’m in my 5th year now.
Over the past 4 years, I missed maybe 5 days in total. I have found it surprisingly easy to stick with the challenge of taking a daily photo. To be fair, I’m generally good at sticking to (self-imposed) deadlines. I hate giving up and I absolutely LOVE a challenge.
All great starting points for a project that would last a whole year.
Here’s what my previous 12 months looked like:
As a visual person, for me, it’s not enough to just take the photos and keep them on my hard drives. Right from the beginning, I knew I’d make a slideshow and a book. That was probably another motivator to stay focussed.
Seeing 365 photos set to music really helps to tell the story of my year. A lot of the images tell individual little stories of a day/week/month that I had forgotten before editing the slideshow.
Seeing these images makes me so grateful for my experiences, challenges, and opportunities this year.
As much as I enjoy writing, I can’t get on board with journalling. But someone once called my Project 365 my journal and seeing it like this really fits. I can only recommend it!
If you’re curious about my motivation, how I stay focussed and some tips on succeeding in a 365, I can recommend listening to my podcast interview with Raymond from The Beginner Photography Podcast earlier this year. Apparently, it’s been one of the most popular episodes this year so I even got featured in his review of 2023.
And if that’s not enough for you and you’d love a real look behind the scenes of how I’ve been running my Project 365 for the past few years, you can subscribe to a course I made for DPF education a couple of years ago. This walks you through how I stay motivated, how I shoot and edit as well as how I organise all my photos.
As I mentioned, I love printing my daily photos at the end of the year. I make a big chunky book to flick through and it’s literally the best birthday present I could make myself every year!
If you’d like to know what my previous years looked like, you can find them all on my blog here: year 1, year 2, year 3.
During the first year, I posted my photos daily on Instagram. Since then I usually share a weekly roundup. If you’d like to follow along with my adventures during my 5th year of this project, come and join me on my 365 Instagram account.
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