It could be stolen, or it could be lost. But it’s gone. The camera, and a roll of film with 20-ish exposures from my 365 project.
What a bummer.
That means most of September is missing. Maybe a bit of late August. Lots of sunrises and foggy mornings – those magical times when photography is so fun this time of year. The light changing, the leaves falling, the hot days and cool evenings.
It could be that I left my little rangefinder in my front seat, and then left the car unlocked overnight, a prime opportunity for a wayward thief. Or it could be that me, the absent-minded photographer, left the camera sitting somewhere out of sight, waiting to be discovered again.
The point is that I can’t leave the 365 half finished. No, I’ll load a roll of Lomo into my Olympus and keep going, and try not to pine for those lost photos from earlier this month.
Reminders basically rule my life. Since my first iPhone, I’ve let a combination of to-do tasks and calendar pop-ups tell me what to do, and when. Everything from taking my daily medication to taking out the trash – I assign a robot to tell me things that I would otherwise forget. It’s a mix of Absent-Minded Professorness and outboard brain reliance.
I know that if I want to build a habit (exercise), or tell myself to do something later in a day (call the cable company), or if there’s something I just can’t or shouldn’t forget (a doctor’s appointment), I have to set a reminder. Otherwise, my brain won’t hold on to the information.
Now, I’m using a reminder system to keep my daily project going. It’s simple: twice a day, Day One tells me to make a new entry. That’s my signal to keep my photo project going – usually at 4 p.m. (before I leave work) and 7 p.m. (before the light disappears).
Why Day One? For me, it serves as both a reminder system and a daily log for the photo I take and the camera settings I used. I can even include a reference photo as a visual clue.
Day One has served me well since the birth of my daughter in 2015. Then, I used it as a journal to record her growing up – personality developments, funny sayings, a photo, that kind of thing. It came in handy when I made her first year photo book; I could look back and see, chronologically, how she was turning into a toddler.
The app doesn’t really matter. You could do something similar with a calendar or a text file. The point is that I rely so much on reminders that I’m using them to keep my daily photo project moving along. I’m both reminding myself and logging my progress as I go. Over time, it may become a habit, and I won’t need to think about it.
But probably not. I know myself well enough to keep a system like this in place until the project is done.
Today is also the start of a project – one that I’ve thought long and hard about since the holidays. It involves taking a photograph every day for a year and not sharing it with anyone.
Then, at the end? I’m not sure. I’ll figure it out when I get there.
That number keeps circling around my brain: 36. Thirty six. More than halfway to Old Man.
