Project 21

I finally did it. I completed Project 21!

In 2005 Jeffrey Yamaguchi published the book 52 Projects. I loved this book! I still love this book. After it came out I not only bought it for myself, I bought a couple copies to give to others.

52 Projects is a book that (you guessed it) offers 52 different creative projects for people to do over the span of one year. Project 21 encourages readers to take a picture of the same thing for one month. For years and years I have attempted to finish this project, and for years and years I have failed. I have lived in 3 different places over the span of me trying to complete this project. One year I actually did take a picture every day for one month. Only the pictures spanned over several cameras and then I lost one of the memory cards from one of the cameras, so I couldn’t put all the final pictures together in the end. Over the years that I have tried to start this project and finally finish it, I completely forgot what the actual original project was. I was certain that the project was specifically to photograph a tree changing colors. But as it turns out, that was just my take on the project and it became so ingrained that I thought that was the project. Really, the project is to document something over one month, whether it be a picture of yourself or a scene, then put the pictures together in chronological order and put them somewhere to share. In the time from when the project was first “assigned” to now, gifs have blown up so it is only natural that I would adapt this project to the times. This is my platform for sharing the documentation of our tree changing colors and losing its fall leaves.

A couple of notes about the this project. The pictures were taken daily, mostly between noon and 1 p.m., from the beginning of October to the beginning of November 2013. The difference in lighting is strictly weather, aside from one picture. I was so excited about decorating the tree for Halloween (Heidi Kenney‘s idea) that I threw in one night shot with the tree lit up. The season ended way too quickly here. It may look like I missed some days, but we had one crazy windy night and one rainy day and boom, all the leaves had fallen. I love that it captures the Chicagoland area fall so perfectly with snow showing up in a couple of the shots. After you are done watching the tree, now pay attention to the burning bush next to the tree.