Daily Oak

Having been a regular reader of Kathy Loomis’ Blog Art with a Needle, in which she frequently praises the merits of Daily or Regular Art – see her post on her new project here (and several other posts throughout the entire year 2010) – I made up my mind during the fall to start another daily project of my own beginning on January 1st.

Five years ago I had attempted a regular art project photographing a row of trees about three miles outside of the town where I live. I went there pretty regularly, although not every day, and took pictures with my camera, at that time not yet digital. The fact that the camera was not digital probably caused this project to flounder because I quickly lost track of the notes where I had taken down the dates and times when I had taken pictures.

So I ended up with lots of pictures that I could even put in chronological order because I had picture indexes done with every film I got developed.

I even had picture CDs made of two of the films, though why not of all the ones I had developed I can’t recall now.

Here are two pictures from early on in the project:

But the pictures were not really dateable any more. That project got stalled when the camera broke, after which it took me a few weeks before I got a new one. Although I did go digital then, I did not resume the tree row project, probably because the distance had wearied me, too. It was too much of an effort to try to get to the trees on a regular basis.

I did finish a photo book into which I put all the pictures just recently:

This experience has directly influenced my decisions about this year’s photo project:

• I will take a picture of a certain oak tree, about a five minute walk from my house, on every day of the year that I am in town.
• In fact, I will take two pictures every day, namely from the same two perspectives every day.
• Over the year I will try to vary the times of day when the picture is taken.
• Once a month I will post a small selection from the photos on this blog.

Here are two pictures out of the first four.

Daily Oak, January 1, 2011

Daily Oak, January 4, 2011

I do hope that the sun is going to reappear eventually and some of the pictures will turn out more cheerful than these two. I missed taking a picture during the one hole in the cloud cover yesterday because the camera's battery went dead right when I arrived at the tree. And unfortunately the partial solar eclipse that took place early this morning here couldn't be caught on camera for this project either. But there are going to be other interesting things happening, I am sure.
And I'll stop by that row of trees every once in a while, too.