Even as a child, I have always have this obsession in documenting my life. As young as 13, I started creating my personal website. I still remember I hosted my site with angelfire.com which is now extinct. Without much knowledge of html, I will fiddle and create silly looking sites and write about my life, at that time, blogs have not existed mind you. So around 2003 when blogs did exist, I jumped on the bandwagon. Digital cameras and smartphones had not really became a norm yet, so I saved and bought myself a web camera that can be used like a digital camera, it could be a mobile camera. I was SO delighted with my Intel CS630 Pocket PC Camera + Web Cam. Can you believe that this camera still works now? It is only 0.35 megapixels and works great still as a webcam. I used to bring this with me everywhere to take pics and save it in the PC. Needless to say, the pics are extremely blurry now when I look back, but still I had my memories documented of those early days when the year starts with 19xx.
This year, I want to go a step further by starting Project Life. Project Life is basically just taking a pic a day, writing a short something about it which can be significant or just plain routine.
I read somewhere last week someone saying that life doesn’t have to be documented by pictures, but rather it is better to live life and enjoy it and let the memories stay in the brain. That seemed to sound so true, however, I then remembered my favourite book called The Notebook. In this story, the old woman suffered from dementia and has totally lost her memory. However, she had written the story of herself and her husband in the notebook, and her husband had to read it to her daily for her to remember who she was. I guess that drove me to start documenting my life as my brain may not be able to remember anything when I am an old woman. In fact, there are already a lot of things that happened 10 years ago that I can hardly remember.
I just finished my first week successfully, I really hope I can carry on for the whole year. To make it easier to not miss a day, I am trusting my iPhone and the cool app, Collect. Collect helps me remember to upload a photo a day and makes it easy to write about it. I can then share the pic to Facebook or other social shares. I also bought a deal from Photobook Malaysia and will be making about 2 books for the year 2013 using the photos I uploaded to Collect. I don’t have to remember what happened yesterday or last week in this way. I really got inspired to do this due to Project Life but buying those files and printed papers can be too pricy for me. For a newbie, I decided to do a digital way.
Here’s one I posted on FB yesterday. For my photobook, I’m doing it the way Project Life does it with the template and it will be a mini 8’x8’ book.
Check out my digital Week 1. Can’t wait to get it printed out later mid year and make it a book!
