Project 365: Year 3

Welcome to another recap of a Project 365.  I can’t believe I’ve done three years in a row of posting a picture every day! (daily pictures are posted at my daily photo blog, The FairView.)This year I’m afraid I got very lazy about making sure my pictures made it up in a timely fashion-there were times when I was putting up 10 pictures and dating them appropriately.  I’m going to try to be better about that this year.  I also am not sure that I had that many super fantastic pictures as last year and the first year. Was I not challenging myself? Am I tired of my subjects-kids, chickens, animals, my garden? I’m not sure what it is, but for Year 4 I’m going to try to focus a bit on quality, not quantity. Which is not to say that I didn’t take many lovely pictures, they were just focused more on activities than just lovely photos. Maybe I’ve just been doing more family snapshots and project documentation? We also had a lot of baby animals at our house this year and that definitely dominated the photostream. So, let’s look at some top pics of the year!

In Motion:   I love this picture of Tabby levitating. She is actually falling backwards, but looks perfectly frozen in time, crystal clear, with her bead necklace floating above her.

(resolved-to put my project 365 pics in flickr, tagged as thus, so I can find them easily!) I also love this action shot of her.Usually it’s Clark who wins the action shot category, and although we did get a trampoline this year most of those action shots were not super.

We had baby chicks and baby guinea pigs this year, so there were many pictures of them. We had chick documentation, natural setting, and, my favorite, dressed up chicks!

We got ducklings and they were adorable, showing up often as a picture of the day as they grew. This is my favorite.

Halfway through the year we got Nibbles & Blackie, two guinea pigs.  Blackie had babies 5 days before the end of the year. Between these two additions guinea pigs were well represented in the daily photo. My favorite guinea pig picture-because the piggie is so small and cute (a few hours old) and also because the bokeh Tabby is blurred and headless, but you can sense the excitement from her clasped hands:

We had some really good family times this year and these two pictures of the day capture them:

Curiously, none of my favorite pictures from our trip to Cape Cod made it to the picture of the day. And from our trip to the Adirondacks, which you may recall from my year in review was wonderful and I loved several of the pictures, none of the ones I posted on that were picture of the day. However, the one that did make it that I think is actually a really great shot for lots of reason is this:

For best food picture I think I need a category somewhere between food and garden that is for garden produce. Thus, best picture of food I prepared (sour cream fudge cake-I liked the contrast of the hot pink and green next to it):

Best produce picture:

Best Garden Picture. There were lots of nice flower, vegetable, and butterfly pictures to choose from. Different from most of the sunny lovely photos I favor in my garden, I truly loved this picture and framed it and hung it in my bedroom. It’s dill, but to me they look like starbursts.

The other garden shot that I loved was all about color to me.

But if I’m going to choose a picture that was just overall best color, it would be this one, which was taken with a friend’s camera:

Best general nature shot is this cantilevered fungus

I’ve mentioned this a lot on Sew Buttons, but this year we visited Duke Farms several times, and that is a photographic paradise between the beautiful natural setting and the fascinating historical old buildings and the gorgeous orchid house. My favorite Duke Farms photo was this black and white of one of the fascinating stone structures, with Tabby and Clark exploring it.

There were several sweet hammock photos.

As for pictures of the kids, when I look at all the Clark pictures that made it I see he has a beautiful smile, it was a year of losing teeth, and he likes being goofy.  Also, I realize that some of my favorites of him didn’t make it into the picture of the day, such as this:

Of the 365 photos, I’d have to choose this-a lovely picture of him smiling with pride and delight at his Pinewood Derby entry.

As for Tabitha, there lots of pictures of her with  animals, friends and family, and she definitely likes to pose. Like with Clark, one of my favorites of her came from Cape Cod and wasn’t the picture of the day:

Not a closeup of her beautiful face, but my favorite this year is her striding along on her birthday.

As for them together, there were lots of nice ones. In fact, when we were making our Christmas card I considered a collage of pictures of them side by side and I had no fewer than 8 beautiful ones throughout the year (and in almost every single one they stood in the same order-isn’t that weird?) Several of them made picture of the day-this was my fave

There were also a lot of nice contenders of the kids with Paul.

So, do I have a very favorite of the year? It’s hard to choose, but I really loved this one, taken in the very first week of January. We were visiting the Aquarium and this seagull was bouncing along posing for me and looking at me with the Philadelphia skyline behind him.

Why, it hasn’t been a bad year for pictures at all! When I look back at them they all make me happy and bring me memories of the occasions, or pleasure at seeing something nice, and what more could I ask for? This year I also got a big new zoom lens (thank you Paul!) and for the first time made some money from my photos by turning them into notecards, which I sold, and by doing photo shoots for some people for their Christmas cards.  Seeing strangers smile at my chick photos or my nature photos and buy the notecards gave me so much pleasure. I’ll definitely work on continuing to find a way this year to sell them through my Etsy shop. So, although I do this post mostly for me, I do hope if you’ve made it here to the end you’ve enjoyed looking at these photos as well, and will stick with me for another 365 pictures!