knowing when to quit

I am currently nearing the end of my 3rd Project 365 – A Year in Photos

365 photos for 3 years is 1095 photos. But that is the number of FINISHED photos. How many photos were actually taken to get that one photo a day? In my case, well over 5000 ADDITIONAL photos.

That is a lot of photos.

2008 rocked! I love the photo book I have from that year. So many memories captured & at what I feel was just the right age. The boys were 4 and 5 and home most of the day. They played with so many different toys. There were so many things to photograph. It was fun and easy and I enjoyed it so much I decided to do it again.

2009 was good. I have a very nice book from that year. It’s a bit on the small side but that is my own fault for being spatially challenged & not being able to visualize how big a 7x7 book actually is. The boys were 5 & 6 and were in school most of the day for most days. They had discovered the joys of the Wii and the Nintendo DS and computer games. They still played with a lot of regular toys though and it gave me a chance to broaden my scope & include random things from daily life to make up for the lack of ‘boys’ toys’ photos. I was still enjoying it so I decided to do it again.

2010 is a struggle. The focus is just things in daily life. I try to make most photos of things that will still be identifiable years from now. Plates, books, the yard. But I do add some random things like sewage manhole covers and leaves in the woods to keep in interesting. The random things from daily life are limited however. My life is very routine. And I live in the country. There just isn’t that much ‘identifiable stuff’ to take photos of over the course of a year. To give myself some structure (because last years lack of structure worked against me) I made a list of 19 things to take a photo of every month; such as the cats, my book pile, the kitchen sink, etc. I’m doing good with 15 of those things still. But the rest of it has become work.

And when hobbies become work, they are not fun for me anymore.

Things became challenging in September, with me missing days or not finding anything new to take a photo of all day long & falling back on “whatever is on my desk”. Then I was sick for 3 weeks in October. I missed more days & kept having to get caught up and by this weekend it had become work to get the photos taken.

There are 7 weeks left and for 6 of them I have plenty of photo ops. We’ll be in Florida for 10 days at the end of November & I always take a couple hundred photos. Then it will be December and Journal Your Christmas which means daily prompts & ideas for photos.

So I am going to finish out the year.

But I am done.

I love the idea too much to not do any photo project next year but it’s going to be smaller & not so timely. I think I may take that list of 19 things and trim it down to 10 or 12 and every month take photos of those 12 things. But I have all month to take those photos, so if life works out that it is the 28th and I have only taken 2 photos, so what? I can take the remaining 10 that afternoon if I want.

Or I may wait until my birthday in July and do a 45th Year photo project, make the 12 items personal to me & run it from July to July.

Either way, no more 365 Projects for awhile.

Unless the boys want to do it.