A day or two before Memorial Day, my friend Tiffany from Peanut Blossom suggested I join her in the Instagram 100 Days of Summer project. Someone somewhere noticed that there were exactly 100 days between Memorial Day and Labor Day this calendar year, and thus, the project was born. I've never done a DAILY photo project before. I've always been intimidated at the drudgery of the task - could I really fit that in to my DAILY life, with how much time it takes? And let's just be honest. Perfectionism has stopped me in my tracks in the past. I knew that I couldn't take a rock star amazing image DAILY, which meant, I'd fail. In my eyes. I'd come onto the other side of the project and not be proud of my work. So I've never done it.
Which is kind of [read: exactly] the opposite of what I've been coaching my two perfectionistic children...
You destine yourself to fail if you never even pick up and TRY.
You never change your patterns of behavior if you always do the same old expected thing.
So I decided I'd TRY and I'd do something different than my norm. I'd do this project. With a few 'freeing' restrictions.
1 - It would all be on my iPhone. To make participating stream lined and easy. Shoot, quick edit, post, DONE!
2 - It would be our real life. Whatever was really happening that day, significant or not. So if real life was in yucky lighting conditions, that was OKAY. I wasn't setting out to create an amazing piece of art. I was setting out to document our real. No pressure. No expectations.
Once Labor Day came and went, I was able to put all of the images together into our official 100 Days set. Let me tell you - this was SO MUCH FUN. The whole family got into it. Seeing this visual glimpse of the summer when the kids were 7 and newly 6 is priceless to me. I am so thankful Tiffany suggested it to me, and I'm thankful I got over myself and went for it! There were days I was uninspired, or it felt a little bit of a burden toward the end (I think 100 days is a really good length, particularly for someone starting on a daily project). But I believe it was good for me as an artist to experience that, and to have the responsibility of pushing through it.
Be on the lookout! I'll be sharing on the Peanut Blossom blog soon about some of the lessons I learned in doing a successful one of these daily projects.