52 photos/weeks 49-52

49.) It took me a few days to finally get the tree up, but I finally did and it was all pretty and Christmas-y and made me smile.
50.) Sometimes when you are working 11 days in a row and it's cold and dark you just gotta look into that dressing room mirror and take a selfie.
51.) I have a bajillion pictures of the sunset from our balcony, but thanks to my night-owl predisposition, barely any of the sunrise. So when I found myself randomly wide awake at 7am one day, I snapped this picture.
52.) I was a little stressed out about what the final picture of 2014 would be, but when I found myself walking through Madison Square Park on a bright and chilly afternoon, I looked up, saw the beautiful contrast of the leafless trees against the blue sky, and thought, "this is it."

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Well, I did it - I successfully created one photo per week in the year 2014 that accurately portrayed my mood/feelings/general sentiment of that week. I loved this project, and it only became slightly difficult these last few weeks when the days were short but the work was long and the light was all sorts of bad wherever I went - but even at that point, it wasn't too terribly hard to come up with just one photo for each of those weeks. Unlike 2013's project in which I decided to post one photo per day, I never ran out of steam (I was over the pic-per-day thing sometime around September), but I think that's because I set myself a much more manageable goal. Taking into account my life and my schedule and the fact that 75% of my time is spent backstage in a darkened cave of a theater, hoping to do a photo per day was an insane idea. But a photo per week? Now that is something I could get behind. And I did - with excitement, gusto, and even a bit of a creative edge. Soon I'll put all 52 photos into a book (because when did we stop printing photos?) and look at it fondly from time to time. I'm really proud of these pictures I took this year - they represent the good, the quiet, the fun, the silly, the long solo walks all over the city (and there were so many!), the travels, the food, the drinks, the plants, the colors, and so much more. Thanks, 2014 - you were a good year.

So what's next? I absolutely will be doing a photo documentation project in 2015, because I believe that it's an exciting and succinct way to encapsulate a year of one's life, and I think I know what I want to do. I got inspired during a recent visit to the Met Museum, but I need to play around with a few things before I actually write a post. Exhilarating stuff, I know. Edge of your seats, right?   ;)

52 photos is my personal challenge to take one awesome picture per week in 2014. All photos were taken by me on either my iPhone 5s or Cannon EOS Rebel T3i (my "big girl" camera). If edited, I use Snapseed, Instagram, or Adobe Lightroom. Follow me - @maspad - to see these and many more pics!