365 Final Thoughts

I have now completed Project 365 and have an album that represents our year with one photo taken for each day. In the end, I have mixed feelings about the project.

PROS:

• Having this format allowed me to catch up on prior years of scrapbooking so I am pretty much caught up to the year 2010, minus a few layouts in the works and random photos from years earlier than 2007 that I have a different long-term plan for.
• This project allowed me to set the camera down more to "enjoy the moments" with the family. I was starting to find that at every hike, outing, adventure, event.... I was taking pictures more than I was interacting. I appreciated knowing that I only needed one decent shot representing the event/day and then I could put the camera away and be a part of the family.
• It forced me to start journaling more, which has always been a weak point in my scrapping. I learned to embrace my handwriting and now find I am willing to add my own handwriting to traditional scrapbooking pages and am just more aware about adding journaling to all of them.
• I really liked the intent of capturing the small moments. I had starting doing a bit of this in 2008 with a few layouts but now I will be more intentional about those types of photos.


• I have a 100% completed album for a year of our life!!!!!!

CONS:

• I am just not in love with the final look of the book put together. Flipping through it doesn't give me the same feeling as my other scrapbooks do. I think it is the lack of similarity in the pictures and absence of "white space" for the eye to rest. There isn't one focus point for pages and is just too scattered for me. In hindsight, I realize there were ways to help with this that some of my friends did (printing with white border, adding photoshopped masks to photos...) or other possible solutions but by the time I realized the issue I was too far into the project to turn back.
• Even though I have lots of the little moments captured I still feel that I am missing some of the big picture of our lives for the year. Especially for larger events, holidays and outings it was hard to represent that with just one or two photos.
• Because I was just going for the photo of the day I didn't get as many WOW photos this year as I have in the last few years.
• I completely failed with my goal to have more photos taken of Tom and I. I think we each only made the album a handful of times. I have tried to get better about this the past 2 years and have just failed miserably and not sure how to tackle the issue.

SO, overall I am thrilled I did the project and learned alot from it. I took alot of photos that I am really happy with and feel a sense of accomplishment in reaching my goal of completing the project on time. I am now wrestling with the plan for 2010. I MUST have a plan and need it formalized ASAP. I have a number of options I am wrestling with and hope to post in the next few days on what I have come up with.