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- Complete 336 Project – document delight, be grateful, practise love.

- Volunteer, give back.

- Go on minimum one date (ALONE) with Errol each month, nurture romance between us.

- Cut out dairy from my diet

- Improve my fitness level

- Cut out the word ‘no’, ‘can’t’ and ‘but’ from my everyday vocabulary

- Visit with the people I love & miss

- Foster a household of healthy eating habits

- Promote my business and earn money

- Save aforementioned money

- Night wean and get Theo out of nappies

- Get Priya comfortable with falling asleep without one of us beside her

Wishing you all a beautiful day with your loved ones!

May you laugh, give and receive with much love!

I will back before the New Year, I hope to see you too!

As a photographer often people say to me: “Wow, you must have a really great camera” which is kinda like saying “Wow, you must have really great scissors” to your favourite hairdresser.

Before starting this 366 project a few people have said “I want to, but I am not that good at taking photos” or “I don’t have a good camera”.

So I wanted to write this post to highlight two points. The first is the title of this post, and it’s true. You don’t have to have a good camera to take good pictures. I keep getting requests from Getty Images to licence images that were taken on my 5 year old point and shoot! Having a beautiful big DSLR does NOT make you a good photographer.

Some of my favourite photos I’ve taken are from my iPhone (and I DO have a big beautiful DSLR sitting under my desk!).

I use instagram on my phone and I love it! (it’s an awesome app if you’re wanting to complete your project on iPhone).

(all from my iPhone – all special memories to me)

Which brings me to the second point I wanted to talk about which is that it really isn’t so much about the quality of the photos when doing this project.

 *All* my favourite photos from the project were ones that held special memories. Not the ones with perfect DOF or exposure. It was the grainy night time nursing or a little out of focus smile. That doesn’t mean if you love photography you should’t challenge yourself and produce beautiful images – you should! But if you’re sitting at home thinking you want to do the project but you don’t know if your photos will be ‘good enough’ – let me assure you something: in any form, documenting delight in your life, from your crappy cell phone to a webcam will be ‘good enough’. These are your delightful moments and 20 years from now I highly doubt you’re going to say “man,  I wish I coulda nailed that focus”. No, you’re going to be squealing (or crying if you’re me) “I can’t believe you were ever that tiny!” or “I can’t believe how good I looked back then!”. I never pull out my parents old snaps and say “Good god mum why is this in B&W and grainy?” No. I say “Omg mum WHAT IS THAT PERM!?” and “Omg mum, is Pop wearing a DRESS?”.

Don’t let your camera or perceived lack of photography skills get in the way of you doing something wonderful, you’d be cheating yourself out of some incredible memories and experience of really looking for delight in your life.

This is the final film friday for this year. I hope you enjoy it.

Speaking of enjoying – do you like the music I use in my videos? I do!

If you do too then you should absolutely check out my little sister Bene’s blog – she is the source of most of my good music. If you’re after some suggestions of new music to listen to with quick, easy reviews – she’s your girl. Please check out her blog Meowzic.

Alright.

Lets get down to practicals.

HOW do you actually do this project?

It sounds simple enough – all you need to do it commit to documenting delight. But there are some things I know some of you are having concerns with. So I am going to explain how I completed my 365 – I realise this won’t apply to some of your different versions of documenting delight but if you’re planning to do the 366 photos and text – this is an outline of how you actually get that done.

Sticking to the project:

My greatest fear on starting the project is that I would ‘forget’ days. I read somewhere once that if you could stick to something for 21 days it would become habit. So in the start, I had my eye on making it three weeks into the project. I can proudly say I did not miss taking a photo any day throughout the year.

Uploading my first photo on the 1st made me feel very excited about the prospect of filling up my album and sticking to my word. It helped me publicly announcing I was doing the project – I don’t like to fail. I certainly don’t like to fail publicly. Haha

I think the fact that we have a group of us committing for 2012 will really help to support you to stick with it.

Taking the photos:

For me; I found the best method for making sure I didn’t miss a photo was taking it within three hours of waking. That way I knew I had a photo for the day. Often though I would take a better photo later that day (say if we went somewhere exciting later) but I always knew I had that morning photo to fall back to if nothing happened that day or I forgot later.

This means, I definitely TOOK more than one photo each day and simply chose the photo I wanted to remember of the day later. Picking which photo to save in the project was probably the hardest part of the project for me. I was very strict on myself about only using photos taking on the actual date. I guess you could be more flexible and swap or change within in a few day space but for me I was very religious about sticking to it. I tend to let things totally unravel if I give myself any freedom in the rules.

All my favourite photos for the year were ones I took when I simply got down on my kids levels and observed. No calling their names. No asking them to smile. No setting anything up. The true memories are the ones that were making themselves.

Now, that isn’t to say I didn’t do those things too. Many a day I found myself desperately trying to find the photo at 5pm with fading light and squealing in the backyard “LOOK AT MY CAMERA, isn’t is LOVEEELY?”. Capturing your kids naturally will be much easier for all involved, promise.

If you’re shooting on a DSLR camera and you don’t know how to use your manual settings – learn. I cannot tell you what a beautiful moment it was when I finally made that transition from auto to manual. Give it a week and it will come easy and I know you’ll thank me when you see how much control you have over the images you’re producing.

Storing & Uploading the photos:

I tried to load my photos to my computer everyday because ideally I would have liked to have them online each night for that day. Realistically this did not happen. I found that posting in arrears worked nicely (say having yourself posting 7 days behind) so that you always have a week up your sleeve to find time to actually sit down and ready the next batch of photos. Do whatever works for you.

Taking photos every single day of the year is a HUGE amount of photos so first up, make sure your computer harddrive has space. Make sure you also have somewhere to back up those photos and back up RELIGIOUSLY. I backed up to two external drives and saved all the full res photographs to flickr. Buying a Flickr pro account is my best recommendation to you. You can upload all your photos there and this is handy when it comes time to print – you have them already there and many print houses have a flickr plugin to load them directly from flickr to print. If anything was every to happen to your harddrives , you’d always have your project saved online. Even if you aren’t intending to have your photos online – get a pro account -there is a privacy option for flickr and (if you want) you can share a password with those you’d like to view your photos.

After loading my photos to lightroom (my favourite place to catalogue and process photos) I would select the photo of the day (this was always the hardest part), process it, export it to the corresponding child’s 365 folder in full res and upload that file to flickr. Easy peasy. Make sure you are careful when you name your files in the folder. I did have the problem once where I accidentally numbered a file a day ahead and didn’t realise for a months – this meant that over a hundred photos were all a day out. It took me a long time to fix that and make sure all the days were numbered correctly and in order.

Blogging, sharing & printing:

As you know, I blogged my project. I started it on facebook but discontinued because I don’t like the quality of fb’s photos. I don’t like that fb owns any photographs you upload there and honestly? I felt like I was spamming all my friends. If they WANT to read about how disgustingly besotted I am with my kids, they can, if not – I am keeping it out of their streams. I loved having my project online publicly. It meant I networked with other mothers, I was given incredible support and feedback through the project and I was able to see other people encouraged to document delight with their kids. There were times when I really felt like giving up but all the lovely comments and feedback I had from friends, family and strangers made me feel like the project was worthwhile and that I should keep going.

Blogging also gave me the reason to add more lengthy descriptions and letters with my photos. I think those words were equally important to me as the photos. I loved expressing how I felt about my children and motherhood and know my children and I will treasure (and cringe!) reading back in years to come.

I blog with wordpress. I host my own site and pay for my domain name and hosting. If you’d like to have your own domain name you can pay a yearly fee at wordpress.com and that way you don’t have to pay for hosting. I found this blogging format to be easy and professional.

It was very important to me that I had hard copies of the projects and so I was so thankful and happy when my mum said she would pay for the printing of the projects into books for our Christmas presents this year (best.present.ever). We printed the books using Blurb. I have to be honest and say I was terribly unhappy with some of the first copies we got which had very poor print quality. Blurb were very quick to resend me good copies though and I will probably print with them again next year. It is ever so lovely to have them in hard copies!

I hope this helps with some of your questions! Got any more? Comment below.

Please join our Facebook ‘support’ group to network and encourage with other people doing the project !

- Georgia x