Montage Monday

Note: This post was composed entirely during ONE phone conversation, which lasted approximately two hours, in which I was trying to fix some travel for an employee who had last minute changes. Terribly frustrating, but I was on hold for some loooong stretches of time, so yay for being able to blog in the midst of it!

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I may or may not make a weekly theme of this idea, but I thought I’d showcase my very first week of Project 365 photos here on the blog, since I figure y’all may not be obsessed with me enough to click on my flickr page every.single.day just to see what I’m snapping pictures of with my little HTC Incredible.

Please pay no attention to my shoddy collage-making skills. Let me tell you how I did it: First, I copied the photos into a blank Microsoft Word document. Then I resized and positioned them like I wanted, and then I added the numbers (WordArt ftw!) and grouped everything together once I had the layout pretty well set. Then I copied the whole grouping into a PowerPoint slide, and added the border and the other bits of WordArt in the white space, and then I saved it as a jpeg. Therefore, the photo quality was diminished, and basically I need to learn how to do this “the right way” if I want to keep doing this on a weekly basis. It would be really cool if I could figure out how to create a collage AND have each picture be clickable to open its corresponding URL over on my flickr page.

(As you can see, I’m only showing you six photos. Later today I will be putting up Day 7, but I wanted to publish this post sooner rather than later, and I can’t take photos at work.)

So…my thoughts on the project so far:

• I like that I’ve begun to look for things that are worth taking a picture of, because it’s helping me to be more observant and aware of what goes on around me. I’m noticing things I often take for granted.
• I’m liking that I can take a pretty decent, high-res photo with my cell phone, because it increases the likelihood that I will succeed with doing this thing daily; if I had to depend on having my digital camera with me at the perfect photo op moment each day, I would definitely fail. However, the phone pictures are, admittedly, a little “blah” to look at, in my opinion. But I think I just need to keep looking for ways to change that — better lighting, different settings, etc.
• I keep finding myself wanting to take self portraits, but then once I try a couple, I realize that they generally don’t “say” anything about my day, ya know? And yet, I am interested to see how I change over time. So, I’m thinking I’ll plan on taking about one self portrait a week, but hopefully not much more than that. I like looking for things that will reflect my day in some way.
• I see the potential for these photos to help me in finding blog inspiration. Just looking at these six pictures alone, I can think of a whole mess of topics I could write about.

Anyway, here’s to another week! I’ve got a lot going on these next several days, but I’m determined to find a moment each day to observe and capture.