I started by going through all three years of Project 365 photos and adding any that grabbed me to a set on flickr. It was so interesting to actually take the time to click through every photo again, because some are so familiar, but the descriptions and tags aren’t as fresh in my mind. I tried to pick photos that I am most proud of, or ones that were taken on important or noteworthy days… but I also wanted to include some of the more mundane shots, too, because if that’s not at the heart of a daily photo project, I’m not sure what is. It became a bit of a labor of love as I added the photos to the layouts in the book, because my old habit of resizing photos to 800×600 or 1024×768 before posting to flickr meant that almost half of the photos I wanted to include were too low resolution to print. So I had to find the original files and re-edit as necessary. That was an adventure, too.

(I included the flickr captions for all three day 365/365 shots, because they make such nice summaries.)

Not only has doing this project gotten me all jazzed to start another round of daily photos, but it has reaffirmed my love for photography. Maybe I’m just the kind of person that needs rules to motivate myself creatively. (You’re shocked, I know.) What I do know, more than anything, is how glad I’m going to be that I got this book made in five, ten, twenty years. When I can pull it out and show kids, grandkids, old friends what I was doing, how I looked, how I found so much happy in the details way back when.

(The book was printed using blurb.com. I chose that solely based on a half off Groupon, and would be interested to compare quality to books from Snapfish/Shutterfly/Adorama, all of which were recommended to me by my photography pals. Using the software on my very old laptop wasn’t always…quick, but it was easy enough to use and very customizable. I went with the standard 10×8 landscape book with an image-wrapped cover. I LOVE the cover. The pages are a bit on the thin side, but I don’t wish I had upgraded. I’m very, very happy.)