A Day in My Life: Year One

On February 13, 2019 just over 13 months after the my first day of shooting I completed my first Project 52/A Day In My Life/Year One. There's a real satisfaction I feel from having stuck with it.

Since becoming a mama my photography had taken a bit of a backseat and I hadn't done a personal project in way too many years and really felt that it was time to start one.  I thought about it for a few weeks before committing myself to doing a weekly day in my life project, although instead of every 7 days it ended up being every 8 days since I wanted to cover a new day each week, that way being able to document the different rhythms that each day brings in our lives. 

The first few months of the project I didn't write very much but then in June I decided I wanted to create a more in depth record of our day and that was when I also began my weekly narrative to my daughter Nixie and now they will be to Forrest too. That was another wonderful thing about this project: I didn't know when I started it that I would become pregnant and be welcoming a little boy into our lives! I want to create memories for them to look back on when they are older, I want to preserve moments and all the different rhythms,  seasons and phases we go through as a family and maybe in doing so when they’re older and looking back they’ll gain an honest and true insight into who I am and learn a bit more about their own path and the way we raised them.  

I know the sadness of not being able to have access to these early memories,  my mother has Alzheimer's and she has no memories of my childhood and through her I have been reminded how important our memories truly are but also how fragile they can be and that is the biggest reason for why I decided to do this project: so that my own children will always have access to these early memories of their lives.

From the very beginning I made a promise to myself that I would never miss a day even if I really wasn't in the mood and I definitely experienced days where the last thing I wanted to do was pick up my camera!  It's much harder doing a day in the life for yourself rather than for a client because on days when it was just me and Nixie it was hard to capture real moments between us. And now with Forrest in our lives towards the very end of the project made it even more challenging! I wanted to make sure I included myself in our days but I was quite limited with the kind of images I was able to make due to having to set up my tripod which takes away the spontaneity but I set it all up in advance in an area I was going to be in and then I just waited to see if Nixie joined me, it was easier to get real moments between us if we were doing some sort of project together.  Nixie got used to me doing this project and whenever it was a shooting day she called it photo day and so far she's still OK with me doing it.  One thing that changed with the way I was shooting was that at the start of the project I photographed a lot more than I did later on in the year when I would wait and be more choosy with what I took photos of, of what memories I wanted to save.  But The hardest part of the project for me was probably the culling, I decided to have 25 images per day, and on some days this was really hard so I’ve decided to share some of the outakes below:

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Week 6

Week 7

Week 11

Week 12

Week 13

Week 14

Week 17

Week 19

Week 21

Week 22

Week 25

Week 27

Week 28

Week 29

Week 30

Week 31

Week 32

Week 33

Week 34

Week 38

Week 39

Week 40

Week 41

Week 43

Week 44

Week 45

Week 46

Week 48

Week 50

Week 51

Week 52

I highly recommend doing this project, it’s been such a fulfilling experience and now I'm already at week 10 of my second year! Please visit: A Day In My Life: Year 2 to follow along!