beauty in the mundane

I think part of the reason I haven't been blogging lately is because I"m attempting my first Project 365. In case you are not an aperture-obsessed girly like I am and have no idea what I"m talking about, Project 365 is taking a photo every day for one year.

I'm not sure where I"m going with this photography thing, but I consider myself a serious hobbyist at this point, and am eager to improve my skills and learn more. If I have a free moment and am not reading about raw milk and soaked grains, I'm reading some sort of photography website, pouring over  Flickr galleries, or drooling over e-course descriptions.

Some folks who do a 365 have themes for it, or you can borrow ideas for themes from online collections. The themes vary from ideas like "underneath" to ideas like "romance". Being naive about the reality of taking one post-worth photo EVERY DAY for 356 days, I pooh-poohed the idea of weekly theme suggestions and plowed ahead with my own idea. Beauty in the mundane. The extraordinary in the ordinary. Well, it's harder than it sounds!

For the first month or so, I just did my typical "oh look, Ava's painting, how cute" shots. They're fine, there's nothing wrong with capturing daily activities. Then I got bored. We don't go out all that often, and when we do it's just to the grocery or a thrift store or something and I'm certainly NOT lugging my giant camera in there! Plus, it's been freakin' freezing outside, so my summer-lovin' self wasn't too anxious to do any nature photography either.

I hit a wall, started taking pictures of dumb stuff like the digital readout on our stove, actually forgot one day *gasp*, hit a really low point with a photo of our bedroom TV remote, and then something happened. It was like a switch flipped...Voila! All these ideas started flooding my mind. I got some great shots like a long-exposure of my mom's crystal punch bowl, and a weird pants-burning experiment we did in our kitchen sink!

Anyways...I'm working on a separate blog for all my 365's...and working on mentally separating that project from my regular blogging. I've taken hundreds of photos in the past several months and they need to be seen!!!