I wanted to post again as  a follow up to an earlier post, in which I outlined what I thought would be some of the major challenges of 365, the photoblog that the Wife and I have maintained since our wedding day. At the time, my biggest concerns were not having enough ideas of things to take pictures of. In retrospect, how in the world someone could assume that this great world of ours would run out of beautiful things to show us, is ridiculous. More likely, as it turns out, is having the camera on hand when those moments present themselves, or remembering to take a picture when you do.

This project has been more of a struggle than either one of us would have imagined, I believe. The light at the end of the tunnel, in regards to the effort that the site requires, in the way of planning, and acting, is that it has forced us to work better together, and to communicate better to each other. We have had multiple arguments at one time or another about who was supposed to be taking pictures, and whose fault it was that none got taken on a particular day. The site is genuinely a microcosm of our marriage. It takes effort from both of us to succeed. When issues arise, the better that we communicate with each other, the better that they’re handled. We’re in it together.

That doesn’t mean that we still don’t argue about certain aspects of the site. She scolds me at times for not putting in enough effort, or not taking the initiative in regards to taking pictures, every day. I get upset sometimes about her picture choices, or her titles, and I can get just as upset as she can if a day gets missed. It’s interesting though, in those times when we do see quite a few pictures get taken in a particular day, or on a particular weekend, to see which pictures that she thinks should be representative of that day. Do you choose the picture that is most descriptive of the events occuring, or do you choose one that highlights moods or feelings about those activities, or do you go for the most beautiful, even if it’s non-descriptive. Those days, though, are rare.

Most days, we just like to take pictures of our cat.

I wanted to discuss some of my initial thoughts about our newest project, 365, a daily photoblog which was a part of The Wife’s wedding gift to me. When I got the beautifully wrapped box in my hotel room that Saturday morning, I was excited, ultimately, that it was finally time to find out what she had gotten me. The Wife is, for the most part, not that great at hiding secrets from me, and I think she would be apt to tell you that as well, if you were chatting with her in a quiet corner at a dinner party, and if she thought you might not tell. For all of the reasons that I chose to marry her, and there are many; if the decision had been based solely on her ability to keep from me secrets about gifts that she has purchased for me, we would not be together today. But I digress.

For literally months prior to our wedding day, she had talked about how wonderful her gift to me would be, and how excited I would be for it. I had made many guesses as to its identity prior to the big day, to no avail. I suspected a camera early on, because we had discussed getting ourselves one as a mutual gift to each other, but that had fallen by the way side, due to her constant protestations against it.

So when the gift was brought to me, by, I don’t even remember whom at this point, it came with two envelopes, one containing a card to read before the gift was opened, and one to read after. The first card said all the things that you’d expect a card from your future spouse to say on your wedding day, and ended by telling me that the time was here, and that I would now be allowed to open the gift that sat in front of me. And with that, wrapping paper was shredded and flung, and my eyes gazed upon the most wonderful gift I’d ever seen.

In all of the commotion that occurred after I opened our new camera, plugging in attachments, and cleaning lenses, and taking pictures, I almost forgot to open the second envelope. When I finally did, though, and when I read what the entirety of my gift entailed, the thought excited me. For the time being though, I put it into the back of my mind, and went about the remainder of the business of being wed. And now here we are.

Almost one month later, and I still very much love the idea of our little project. And I love my wife for trusting me enough to let me create a new design, and a new web address for our project, even though she had gone to quite the trouble of already preparing a site. I love the look of the site, and wouldn’t have been as excited about this whole thing if it hadn’t meant for me a chance to take on one more personal design. I’ve actually heard her agree, too, but I’ll have good luck on the day that I can get her to admit to a third party that I’ve done it right. Once again, though, I digress.

While the blog has been exciting, it has brought about some interesting situations. For instance, on certain days, we tend to get in a rut, performing the same tasks for days at a time, and making the prospect of a unique, and interesting picture a daunting task. This has not hampered us all that much to date, but I trust if we give it time this will be the case. A year is a long period of time, and we’re typically not that interesting to begin with. On the other hand, though, on those days where there is a lot going on in our lives, and there have been more of those than normal so far, it becomes difficult to decide which in a very large group of pictures to choose as representative of the entire days’ activities. And finally, there’s always the idea sitting in the back of my head that I need to save certain shots that I know I can take at any time, for days when I really need them.

For instance, about three weeks back, I took a picture of our cat one morning, which turned out really well, and which became the picture that we used for that particular day. However, I knew, and still know, that I can take a picture of the cat any day, if I need to. And that probably won’t be the last time she shows up on the site. But in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help but think, “Save that shot for another day, when you might really need it, you’ve got all day to find another shot for today!” And that’s what makes this whole thing interesting, in my opinion, is those types of situations. That, and trying to see the noteworthy or the beautiful in a place card, or a thank you note, or a pint of ice cream.

So I’ve resigned myself to the fact that while this is the first time that I’ve noted my thoughts about our new project, it most certainly won’t be the last, and so I’ve titled it as such, accordingly. It will be interesting to me to see not only how the photoblog progresses throughout the year, and maybe more, but also how ours and others’ perceptions of it change as more images are posted, and as more images are sought out in our world. I suppose only time will tell.

The Girl and I just returned from our nine day vacation with her family, and we had a wonderful time. Some of the views, and the activities, will be remembered for a long time to come. I just got the entire set of pictures onto Flickr, but you can see one of the better ones below, a view of our ship, from the beach on Labadee, Haiti.

The urge to smoke while on vacation was almost non-existent. As a matter of fact, I completely forgot to put on a nicotine patch a couple of days. Add that to the fact that cigarettes were, for the most part, completely unavailable, and the week was pretty smooth sailing, on that front. It also didn’t hurt that food was always available.

Hopefully I’ll have time to expound on our wonderful vacation in the next few days.

What a perfect weekend to get away. The weather agreed with us, for the most part. With the exception of some strong winds, and short, but heavy rainfall on Friday night, this weekend was picturesque as The Girl and I traveled down to her old stomping grounds, to go camping on Loft Mountain in Shenandoah National Park.

We arrived a bit after 10:00 PM on Friday night, to find our tent already set up, a fire going strong, and drinks being poured by the remainder of our camping crew. We woke up early on Saturday a little worse for wear, and, after a great breakfast over the camp fire, we set out to do some hiking and generally interact with nature. Saturday night was spent recuperating from our day’s hike, and enjoying more good food and drink, and a ‘dramatic re-enactment’ from The Girl as entertainment.

This weekend was exactly what I needed. I really appreciated being able to relax and take my mind off of everything but the world around me for a couple of days. No worrying about work, or fretting over Ole Miss football, or planning for the wedding, was just what the doctor ordered, and I’m very appreciative of the rest of the crew for really doing the bulk of the planning to make the weekend happen.

The scenery that we encountered was breathtaking, and I only wished that the pictures that I and The Girl took could honestly do it justice. I leave you now with a photo of our fateful camping crew, as taken by L, she of the engagement photos, and a photographer so knowledgeable of the ways of her craft that she is actually able to be in pictures that she takes:

(click on either photo for a link to the full set)

Much thanks need to go out to our very good friend L, she of the photo-journalistic tendencies, for going with The Girl and I this past Sunday to take some engagement pictures. I really wasn’t feeling very good about myself on Sunday, hungover after a typical Rebel football Saturday, and really feeling like I just wanted to curl up on the couch and sleep my way through until Monday. We were going to take ‘a few’ pictures, and ended up with upwards of 700, but after seeing the finished product I’m so glad we did it, and I’m glad that L was taking the pictures. She helped pull us out of our initial awkwardness a bit faster than a stranger would have, and she had no problems giving us direction, and coming up with great ideas, and you can really see the care, and the love that she put into the finished product, and for that, The Girl and I will have to spend the rest of our lives trying to find a way to thank her, because these pictures are something that we’ll keep with us for the rest of our lives, and that’s priceless.

The picture above is one of my favorites of those that L has shown us so far. All in all, as per usual, The Girl looks much better in most of them than I do, but I’m alright with the idea that I’m the one marrying up. View the full set here, and thanks again to L for such a fun afternoon, and such a wonderful gift.

When I launched the site’s redesign a few weeks ago, it was only partially complete. It was materially enough complete to publish, and I was excited about getting it up and running as quickly as I could. There are, though, small little tweaks, fixes, enhancements, additions and subtractions, outside of the basic additions of posts, or updating outbound links. As an example, you can see the Frequently Asked Questions page. I wanted to update the look of the past editions of this site, to give more information, and to give it a cleaner look than was employed previously. As another example, though, read the answers to many of the questions related to my content management through Wordpress. They’re don’t make a lick of sense within my current site architecture, and need to be updated. So it’s little things like that that I spend my time on, when I do have a fleeting moment or two to devote to the site, often at the detriment of actual posts. It’s just as important, though, at least to me, as the posts, and so I do those things so that the site can be considered complete in my own eyes. It’s a labor of love, I know.

With that in mind, 0ne of the pages sorely in need of attention is the about page. It has served it’s purpose in the past, for sure, but I really wanted to add to it, to sort of revitalize it along with the rest of the site. To help accomplish this, I e-mailed The Mom about three weeks ago. I wanted to know if she had any older childhood pictures of me in digital format, because I wanted to add a few to the site. Of course, she didn’t. I asked as politely as possible for a favor, the 1,743,597th favor that I’ve asked my mother for since I was born, to be exact, and within a few weeks, after I’d forgotten, actually, I received the gift of twenty-something pictures from all steps of my childhood journey through this world. The pictures brought back memory after memory, but, as anyone from my generation knows when looking at pictures of themselves as a child, it was hard to distinguish, when viewing, if the coloring in the photos were due to aging, or the god awful outfits we were forced to wear as children of the seventies.

After downloading all of the photos, I spent my lunch break at work doing some color correction on the photos in Photoshop, and was amazed at the results. I use Photoshop CS2, and am generally a huge fan of all things Adobe, anyways, but the ease of which I was able to bring life back to the past surprised even me, and the results are obvious, as you can surely see:

The pictures seemed to jump off the screen, to the point that I actually began to think about the implications of such a process. Imagine a world in which history doesn’t fade; where the photo of your great, great grandparents, passed down through the years, can be saved, possibly forever, for future generations. Or where your parents wedding photographs can be displayed at their 50th wedding anniversary, as if they were taken yesterday. Of course, the beauty of originality can’t be overstated, but the safety of a digital alternative, brought to a world in which wear and tear is inevitable, can bring an assurance to those important event that we want to be remembered. Or even those moments where our mothers put us in frilly jumpsuits and gave us girlish hair cuts.

Such moments may not go down as legendary in the annals of history; maybe not even my own personal history, but they serve my purpose now. The update of the about page should be done shortly, and I’ve got a brand new set of pictures, which I’ve decided to share on Flickr for all to see. Some, I like, but they’re all there, even the ones that I’m less than proud of. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll be around for a while.