[seconds and decades]: September 2008

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

The End

My camera is broken, so, three days shy, the blog is over. It's been a great year-long experiment. I think if you look back to the pictures I was taking a year ago, you'd see a lot of improvement. Certainly I'm not professional photographer, but when I started this project I wanted to become better. And I think I've accomplished that. A year ago, I had a little point and shoot (which I dropped relentlessly). Now, I have a better (albeit broken) camera with two lenses.

This project has taught me so much about documenting, about showing a day in one picture (though, of course, I cheated a bunch of times and put up multiple photos. Even when I talk, I talk too much). I think later on, it'll be really interesting to go back and see what I did this whole year. Even now, some of what has happened seems so long ago. Back when I started this, all my favorite friends still lived in Portland. The love of my life was moving in. Then she lived with me. Now, she's gone.

I guess this photo is as good as any to stop on. It's out of focus (part of my camera's problem), but my life kind of is, too. It's Margaret, a new friend (a friend who never would have happened without all the unravelings of this year) cutting Randi's hair. Randi's pretty much the last remaining piece of the life that used to be mine. There are a couple of friends -- my work boys! -- whom I still have (and to whom I actually feel closer), but Randi is the last of my girl crew, the people I wove my life around. So it's a good intersection, this picture.

It has been so fun to have this thing, but also at times a hassle. Some days I didn't do ANYTHING photographable. That's where you'll see pictures of what I ate for dinners. Sometimes, I didn't enjoy something as much as I should have because I was trying to get a picture.

I know some of you don't want the blog to go away, but I think I learned all I could from it. I want to take classes and move onto a new level somehow. I think I got better just because , well, if you're showing your friends a picture every day, you eventually get sick of it being really ugly. But there's only so much I can teach myself.

But keep your RSS feeds primed: In a couple of weeks, I hope to transform it into something new, something more mixed media.

Thanks for watching, for participating, for putting up with my camera in your face.