2009 Project 365 final picture

Last year my friend and I completed the enormous task of taking a "photo a day" for the entire year. I was true to myself and on the day, every day took the photo. Becky Higgins Project 365 kit sold out in America in about 2 hrs and the $40 kits ended up on ebay USA for over $200. Given that the kits were as scarce as hens teeth I looked around for a different solution. I came up with idea to use the red photo box from kikki-k stationery stores which fitted our needs. The journalling was typed directly onto each photo including the day and date and then it was just a matter of printing it and putting straight into the album. I would edit the photo each night and then save it to my disk and the next time I was at Harvey Norman print a batch of photos.

It was a great project because during the course of the year my photography improved and I also got to take more photos of our everyday life rather than getting the camera out for special events, birthdays, holidays and Christmas. It renewed my enthusiasm for photography which I just love and my photos got better as the days went on.

Getting back to my final photo for the year I knew it had to be good. Remembering back to the previous New Year's Eve where my nephew attempted to write an M with the sparklers and me tying to photograph it I gave him a bigger project this time. That was to write 365 in sparklers. He had to practice writing the letters backwards given that I was taking the photo from in front of him and it had to be big enough to see.

My camera card was just about full from taking photos of a beautiful 7 day old baby and his family that morning, my computer had run out of disk space to download them so I was at a disadvantage to start with. We made lots of attempts until we got the right size number and they looked good all the time it looked like a 3 ring circus, with me instructing, my family watching and laughing and the whole thing was funny from start to finish. We were laughing so much we were crying.

We finally ended up with 3 photos of the numbers by themselves and then had to photoshop them together for the picture. I felt it was too much to photograph the thing in one go due to constraints like the sparkler running out of sparkle etc. and me trying to hold the camera on what was a very slow shutter speed. My nephew was the clever person to patch the 3 photos together and then he included the "Happy New Year" using part of the sparkler pattern for the writing. So for the record, I did photograph the actual numbers 3, 6 and 5 with sparklers outside but the Happy New Year is some photoshop magic. I was thrilled with the end result and the memories and the laughter from that moment will stay with me forever.