I love taking pictures.

A friend of mine has started a project with another friend of hers, and asked me if I wanted to participate:

365 days. 365 pictures. The concept? Simple. The goal? To showcase the world as we see it, everyday.

The idea behind this mission is to take our everyday lives and put them on the big screen, to turn the ordinary and average into extraordinary and unique. There's beauty in everything, you just need to look for it.

What should you expect? Photographs. Some edited, some raw. Taken with whatever camera we happen to have on us at the time the opportunity strikes us. Updates. Seven pictures, once a week. Diversity. Life doesn't deal with the same things day in and out, and so this project has no boundaries. And captions, because we want to share the meaning behind the photo.

I'm not nearly as ambitious as she and her friend are so I don't think I'll actually manage a picture a day. I do love taking pictures though, and as Steph put it, now I can feel like I have a legit reason to be taking them all the time. =D

I can't remember when I started loving photography so much, but I think it was probably during my first photography class my junior year of high school. I fell in love with the dark room and...creating. To take what I saw and make something physical to share my point of view was just so cool. I went on to take another class my senior year as well as aide for a beginner class.

When I went to Del Val I told people I was giving up my hobbies--theatre and photography--to follow my dream. (Del Val didn't have an arts program.) I just realized as I was planning out this entry that I didn't really give up photography. I got a digital camera and since then I've pretty much had a camera with me at all times.

Lately, it's been more convenient to use my iPod though I'm going to have to fix that because the photo-quality is just not up to my OCD-like standards. ;p Anyway, here is the first installment, the most recent "artsy" shot I've taken:

Taken on my iPod, and a little grainy, but I still like it. To make up for the poor quality of that one, here is my favorite of all my artsy shots so far:

I took this on one of my last days at Del Val on my little Olympus and it is the photograph that I am most proud of so far.

I think I'm going to enjoy this blogging-with-photos thing.