Photo-a-day-ing again?

I first did a Photo a Day project in 2007 on Flickr, and I'm pretty sure I made the full year. At the start I knew absolutely nothing about photography and doing the project gave me a fantastic introduction to it - to ISO, to composition, to depth of field, to bokeh, to the wonder of the Nifty Fifty, and to a brilliant group of friends who I'm still very close to.

I've attempted the project each year since with deteriorating success, and so as usual, am making my start of the year effort. Having spent about 2 hours this afternoon just downloading, editing and processing my snapshots over Christmas to put onto Facebook, I couldn't bear the thought of getting sucked into a heavy commitment to photography as I did in 2007 (a LOT of late nights messing around in Photoshop, organising folders, culling rubbish shots etc). So I started thinking about ways I could make the project easier. The first thing that sprang to mind was to use my iPhone 4S and Instagram, which I've been using loads recently, including for the little Advent Calendar project I did in December (below).

I then thought about breaking the year down into a series of mini projects to make it less overwhelming and more inspirational, and looking around my kitchen, saw lots of things that could help kick off my thinking. So, I grabbed carefully took my favourite drinking glass off the shelf and went upstairs to play around with my iPhone and some dreadfully creased wrapping paper in a pathetic attempt to get a decent shot of it. Failed miserably. Dusted off my DSLR (Canon EOS 450D) and my 50mm lens, and tried again. Got one I vaguely liked, but nothing like the picture I had in my head. Messed around in Photoshop for about 30 minutes. Uploaded it to Flickr with a sinking 'it'll have to do' attitude. It's now nearly 2am and am I really sure I want to do this for a whole year again??!!