As for the 365 portrait thing I mentioned yesterday I've seen bits and pieces of it everywhere. It started somewhere with the idea of taking one picture a day for 365 days. It's kind of all over now. There's a flickr group here for the daily picture of whatever. There are weekly challenges and pools of a ton of pictures. There's info on it at Photojojo. It's a good way to get better at taking pictures and getting in a better habit of taking pictures.
The self-portrait 365 project is all about taking a self portrait of yourself every day for a year. If you check out the pool you'll start to see the deviations from the typical head shot (or my personal favorite the myspace-in-my-bathroom-mirror-without-my-shirt-on shot--which EVERY guy has on his myspace page). Amber, who you might recognize her stuff from OLW is doing it too, but she started in early Dec. Her pictures are a pretty good range as well. (I read her blog sometimes because I love her style and she and her husband take some awesome pix--they do the photo thing professionally though but it's a good way to get inspiration.)
I love this idea of grabbing bits and pieces of real life + getting better with the camera in general. I have a nice Cannon SD630 Elph which is a great camera to take with me everywhere because it's super small. I don't know enough about it though because I'm not super into the photography thing. And it's not so much that I want to take artsy photos, or do it professionally. I just want to take better shots of my own memories. Plus I really want a digital SLR camera but can't justify the money until I've worn this one good and out.
I'll probably do the portrait challenge and the more and more I think about it the more I want to do the regular one as well. Photojojo also has some other great photo resolutions (goals if you will) if you are interested. I just stole the link to the site from Ali Edward's blog post so I'm going to do a little more reading into it.
If anyone decides to pick up the 365 challenges let me know! I'm on flickr and I'd love to add contacts who are doing the same challenges. I'm not sure if I'll join the flickr groups or not, but I might. I'll let you know.
I've been delaying thinking about it and now I'm behind, but Ali Edwards was talking about her word for the year. She talks about this trend she started with picking a word to use as your inspiration and focus for the year. Here's one of her old blog entries about it and then more stuff here. The second link actually has a list of words people told her they were using for 2007 and it's helpful if you're like me and you need a little boost. I love this idea of a word to focus on. I'm like obsessed with words though. But it does help. I'm still thinking about mine but I should have it nailed down within a day or two. Let me know if you come up with something.
Here's wishing you and yours all the best for 2008.