“Try something new for 30 days”, Matt Cutts
My NSW Department of Education and Communities colleagues on Maang have decided to embrace the advice of Matt Cutts in his TED talk, “Try something new for 30 days” (above).
First up is the Photo Challenge (click for the cumulative slideshow). For the next 30 days, we take a photo a day and post it under the dedicated thread for the day. Day threads will be numbered according to which day we are up to. Subject matter? “What’s happening in your life/work today?” (I’m already experienced in this type of challenge, have done the 365 Photos project in 2009-2010.
Here’s my pic:
DAY 1
These homemade stuffed cats date back to my teachers college days (1979), based on my cartoon characters, Fish’ook and Bluey, who featured in a comic strip in the college newspaper, “Dugil”. They turned up in a vacation cleanup this week; hadn’t seen them in years! (Ah, Hobbytex – remember those roll-on paint-in-a-tube things you bought on party plan like Tupperware?)
What I loved about the 365 PHOTOS project was the anticipation of finding a daily pic. It kept the senses tuned all day, flitting in and out my head, seeing potential subjects everywhere. Some days I’d forget until almost midnight – I ended up with about ten shots of the dog looking startled, wondering if it was past our bedtime. The project unexpectedly made me blog more often.
It recorded some very significant events, including my last photo taken of my Dad before he passed away, but before he started to look too frail. It’s a year of my life more fully documented than any other in my life. It also led to a fun afternoon chatting to TV personality, Andrew G, who was doing a 365 self portraits challenge of his own and had a gallery exhibition.
You can’t really imagine what 30 days of doing anything will lead to. It’ll be great to see what happens sharing experiences with a group. A great project for a class, too.