project 365 posts

Photographers have always known that the more pictures you take, the more you learn about photography. Digital photography has made it easy and inexpensive for photographers of any experience level to take as many photos as they want. In addition, the advent of fairly high-resolution phone cameras has added the touch of having a camera with you almost all the time.

In 2004, a chap by the name of Taylor McKnight started taking one picture a day and posting the photos as a way of chronicling his life and what was important to him. Over the year, he also found that he become a better photographer. The classic photography website Photojojo published his post about the process in 2006, and the rest is history. There are now thousands of photographers who are shooting their way to better pictures one day at a time.

Developer Alvin Yu has made it possible for any iPhone owner to create their own Project 365 portfolio through his free Project 365 app [iTunes Link]. The app is quite simple; launching Project 365 shows you a monthly calendar with a blank area for each day. Tapping on the date allows you to add a photo, either by taking one or adding it from your photo library. Once you've chosen the photo, you can add a caption, then send the photo either to an email address, to Facebook, or to Twitter.

Photojojo is a community focused on photography tips, tricks, DIY projects and other kinds of picture-taking goodness. Recently, they introduced Project 365, essentially coining a(nother?) term and offering tips for those take-a-picture-a-day-for-a-year-or-three projects that broke out on the interwebs over the last year or so.

Inspired both by this Photojojo post and the recent 'snap a pic of users who commit invalid login attempts' hack, Adam Pash at Lifehacker penned a Photo projects for the New Year post in which he put together a script that can automate this process on iSight-enabled Macs, more or less taking the effort out of your own Project 365. The script can be set to run each time you login (properly, of course) or at a specific time of each day, and Adam includes instructions for tweaking them to your needs. By default, they're set up to snap the pic and save it in ~/project365/pics/, adding a timestamp to the name of each file to help you keep track of everything when you're ready to make your YouTube debut.

I think this is a fantastic idea, and now that I have an iSight in both my MacBook and iMac, I think I might actually take a crack at this myself. A big thanks to Adam for putting together such a cool script, and be sure to check out Photojojo's original Project 365 post for tips, motivation and ideas on what to do with 365 pictures of you and/or your stuff.