Where wall meets ceiling meets railing meets floor meets lighting beam

#ds77 Wherever there's an edge, there's energy.

Make a photo where two things meet: land-water, land-sky, etc.

Late night, picking up Minnie from Mom & Dad's

#ds76 Get up close and personal with a building today. Make a photo of an architectural detail.

I didn't taste, but it sure looks sweet!

#ds75 Sugar, spice, and everything nice. Make a photo of something sweet today.

I'm not afraid of the store brand anymore.

#ds74 The economy is in the news all the time.

Make a photo that illustrates the economy or its impact on you in some way.

Grab a spoon and dig in!

#ds73 Take something common--an object, building, or landscape--

and compose an abstract composition with it.

No need for a ladder ... I've got a loft!

#ds72 Change your perspective today. Make a photo from a bird's eye view.

Get out the chairs and ladders if you need to!

We tell our students there are millions of right angles all around you!

#ds71 Right (90-degree) angles can help define a composition.

Make a photograph involving intersecting lines.

Those ears hear EVERY noise in the neighborhood!

I call it a collection ... others might call it an obsession :)

#ds69 We're all collectors of something.

Find an interesting way to display and make a photo of a collection today.

What could be cuter than this hiney?

I love you, Diet Coke

#ds67 Quirky things often catch your eye and make for interesting art.

Make a photo of something that makes you go "Hmmm" today.

All pastels

#ds66 Make your camera the star of the show today.

Use another camera or mirror to put your camera in a photo of its own.

The wheels on the bike go round & round

#ds65 Make an interesting photo of a mode of transportation today: 

car, plane, bicycle, subway, or whatever you like!

Hungry for eggs?

#ds64 Practice the art of simplicity today by making an interesting photo 

from a minimalist perspective.

New decor in my loft!

When you abandon your condo in the winter, chances are your pipes might burst!

#ds62 One man's trash is another's treasure.

Make a photo of something discarded or abandoned today.

{This is a picture of the condo next to me that has been on the market since last April. The owner/Realtor must not have left the heat on or the water dripping. I just heard from another neighbor that the pipes burst & they are leaking into condo below! Yikes!}

From Minnie's viewpoint

#ds61 Converging lines direct the viewer's eye.

Sometimes found in railroad tracks, highways, and buildings.

Snowmen both inside & outside at school!

#ds60 Play with contrasting scale today: juxtapose something small with something big!

I wear one of these scarves most winter days

#ds59 Make a photo of something you wear to keep yourself warm

and/or dry: coat, gloves, scarf, hat, you name it!

Rockin' the Glee playlist!

#ds58 Someone once said "Music is what feelings sound like."

Make a photo of something musical to illustrate the quote today.

All pink, all the time!

#ds57 What's your favorite color?

Make a photo dominated by your favorite color today and share it!

She even has a cute silhouette!

#ds56 Silhouettes are an interesting way to abstract a subject.

Make a photo featuring a silhouetted subject today.

Gift for my funny friend ... wrapped up in the funnies!

#ds55 The printed newspaper isn't as common as it used to be.

Find a newspaper today and make a photo any way you like!

Instead of working on report cards, I'd rather start a new book

#ds54 Glasses help many folks bring the world into focus each day.

Make a photo of a pair of any kind of glasses today.

Taken from INSIDE!

#ds53 It's winter time here in the northern hemisphere.

Make a photo with snow, frost, or ice as the theme today.

Let there be light

#ds52 We typically use light to illuminate a subject.

Turn it around today and make a photo of a light source of any kind.

She dines in style

#ds51 Reflections draw the eye. Find a pool, puddle, or other body of still water and make a photo of a reflected subject today.

(I knew all the water around me was frozen, so this is what I went for! :) )

Project 365

I'm only 4 days into year two of this blog and I'm finding new ways to approach it. On Twitter, I started to see that a lot of the people I was following were talking about a 2010/365 project. When I started to pay attention to what they were saying, I realized they were talking about a daily photo blog.

"I'm already doing that!"

How could I change it? Well, now I'm following a lot of people who are also doing a photo-a-day. I've put some links on the right side and I hope to find more that are interesting to share with you. Several people are just posting their photo of the day to their flickr page or uploading it to Twitter. I'm trying to give links to blogs or pages that have compiled all these pictures.

The other thing I'm doing is following someone new on Twitter, @dailyshoot. I'm SO glad I found them, but sorry that I didn't know about it before this week. @dailyshoot is someone that gives an assignment each day. Once you do that, they ask you to pick your best picture, upload it with the correct label (#ds) and then they will compile those pictures on a site each day (http://dailyshoot.com/) While I know I will often find things on my own to take pictures of, the assignment has been nice AND a challenge for me. It also makes me look at things differently & try new things ... which is the whole reason for my blog in the first place!

I'm planning on posting the assignment for the day under a photo, if that's the one I choose to post. I may not always be able to do that day's assignment, but I thought you might like to see the reason behind why I shot that. Up until now, I just posted things that happened to do with my daily life, but now they may not have a meaning. I will also put a label of #ds on that photo, so you can look back into my other assignments if you wish.

The other thing I wanted to share was a great article about starting a 365 project. I try to keep this blog strictly pictures, so if I got all this explanation out of the way now, that would help.

It's called "How to Take a Photo a Day and See Your Life in a Whole New Way":

People will often say that their whole lives flashed before their eyes after they experienced a traumatic event. Perhaps it’s a bit morbid, but we think that sounds pretty incredible.

When Taylor McKnight started taking a photo a day on January 1st, 2004, he never imagined the project would not only serve as a way to remember a year, but also help him understand what was important to him in his life.

Whether it was his relationships, his career, or his fashion sense, recording a photo a day for a whole year left him with a rich visual history of his life. And it made him a better photographer to boot!

Now that he’s in the middle of doing it for a second time, we asked Taylor to write about it for us. Read on for our tutorial on how and why to create your own daily photographic history.

WHY DO IT?

Taking a photo a day is a big undertaking with big payoffs. Here are just a few reasons why you should consider doing it:

• Imagine being able to look back at any day of your year and recall what you did, who you met, what you learned… (Often we find it hard to remember what we did just yesterday or even last night, let alone a whole year ago!)

• Your year-long photo album will be an amazing way to document your travels and accomplishments, your haircuts and relationships. Time moves surprisingly fast.

• Taking a photo a day will make you a better photographer. Using your camera every day will help you learn its limits. You will get better at composing your shots, you’ll start to care about lighting, and you’ll become more creative with your photography when you’re forced to come up with something new every single day.

TIPS ON HOW TO DO IT

Here are six tips on how to create your own Project 365:

1. Bring Your Camera Everywhere
   Yes, everywhere. Get in the habit. Grocery stores, restaurants, parties, work, and school. Going to a movie theatre? Snap a pic of the flick with your phone–there are photo-ops everywhere. If you have one of those tiny tiny cameras, you have no excuse not to have it in your pocket all the time. And if you don’t? Camera phones are a great substitute.

2. Make Posting Easy
   You can install blog software like Movable Type or Wordpress on your own site and create an entry for each photo, but for true ease of use, try a photo sharing site. Flickr will let you post a week’s worth of photos in 2 minutes flat, and fotolog and Photoblog.com are geared toward a photo-a-day workflow. Making it fast and easy means you’re much more likely to do it.

3. Vary Your Themes
   Try to capture the day’s events in a single photo. Perform photographic experiments. Take a photo of someone new you meet, something you ate for the first time, or something you just learned how to do. Take a photo of something that made you smile. And don’t forget to take a photo of yourself at least once a month so you can remember how you’ve changed, too.

4. Tell a Story
   Use your blog entry, or your photo description, to explain what’s going on in each day’s photograph. How good did that dinner taste? What made you want to take a photo of that stranger? It’ll help you remember down the road, and it gives friends following along a better appreciation of why you took the photo you did. You don’t need to write a lot, just enough to add some color.

5. Don’t Stop, No Matter What
   This is perhaps the most important tip of all. You will get tired of taking a photo every single day. Some days, you will consider giving up. Don’t. The end result is worth the effort. Remind yourself why you wanted to do it in first place.

   There will be times you’ll think there’s nothing interesting left to take a photo of, and times you’ll think you didn’t do anything exciting enough to take a photo of. There’s always a great photo to be made.

   Get out of the house and take a walk. Or stay inside and look around. Take a photo of something important to you. Take a photo of the inside of your house so you can see how your taste has changed over the years. Take a photo of anything, just don’t stop.

   N.b. It helps if you’ve told your friends about the project and asked them to follow along. Their encouragement will keep you going!

6. Post early, post often
   Plan on going through and posting your photos at least once a week so you don’t get backlogged and feel overwhelmed. Ideally, post every day or two. Again, spend the time up front to make sure it’s quick and easy to post. It’ll make all the difference.

I think it's also interesting that the article is about someone with the same name as mine! Maybe we are related!

As a reward for completing the first year of this blog, I splurged on getting my favorite photos from each month turned into a photo flip book. Snapfish tells me they will be here in a few days ... I'm really excited!

Maybe I can even inspire YOU to start with a 365 project! We're just a few days in, so you could start now. I hope by sharing this information you will understand why I'm doing it and hopefully not look at me like I'm a crazy person when I pull my camera out of my purse to take a picture of a shadow, or a tree, or your pet, or food!

I'm rich!

#ds: The frame of a photograph is rectilinear.

Fill that frame with a circular subject today and make a photograph.

Laundry day (apparently I have a LOT of these tanks)

#ds: Pick a focal length, any focal length, and stick with it the entire day.

And ... the holidays are over at this home!

The daily photo blog continues ... starting today!