131/365: I was lying- I got another photo out of the Valentine flowers.  Here are some daisies.  I set up a white backdrop and studio lights in my dining room to take the flower pictures, and I have the sneaking suspicion that they may remain up for most of the year.

132/365: It does make it easier to take random macro pictures of household objects, like these matches.

133/365: This was really difficult to photograph.  I hoped that it would turn out better, more composed, less problem with the light, but oh well.  I will try it again sometime because I have a few ideas in mind that I would like to work.

134/365: Cardinal in my parents’ backyard.  They have a lot of feeders and a lot of trees, and, consequently, a lot of birds.  This was a cold, rainy day, but the cardinal was patiently waiting for his turn at the feeder.

135/365: A mess of blankets on the couch, but the colors are so pretty together that I couldn’t help taking a picture.

136/365: A fire in the fireplace, probably one of the last of the year.  This was another hard one to photograph because of problems with the light.  I will have to think on how I want to get this to work.

137/365: This is my eye.  My right eye.  This was harder to take than I thought it would be, because the camera wouldn’t focus every time, and it’s hard to get the right composition and the focus correct when you’re not behind the camera.  And every time I took a shot, two flashes would go off.  I took more than 100 to get this one.  But it worked.

I love the details.

118/365: I spend a lot of the year waiting for snow, but it’s hard to catch it falling on camera.  I used a flash here to freeze the flakes with a pine tree as a backdrop.

119/365: I should get a stepladder next time to get a better perspective on the roof with the snow on it.  It looked better in my mind, the pattern of the shingles.

120/365: I have a lot of potted shamrocks at my house, but the leaves close at night so it’s hard to shoot them.  I liked the way this turned out.  I like winter, but this makes me think of spring.  I like spring too.

121/365: This is snow clumped on a dwarf white Alberta spruce in my side yard.

122/365: My boots.

123/365: I like the way the shower water is caught by the light in my bathroom.  It probably wasn’t a good idea to take the camera in there, but what the hell.  Next time I’ll take the flash too.

124/365: Martha.  She puts her ears forward, and then sometimes she cocks her head at me.

125/365: A little bit of snow on the driveway made for a neat gradient.

126/365: We took a trip over to the Churchill Museum in Fulton.  This is the ceiling in St. Mary church, in the basement of which is the museum.

127/365: Alstroemeria, from a lovely bouquet of Valentine flowers that my dad sent me.  I set up my big studio lights and a backdrop to do some shots.

128/365: Pink Alstroemeria.

129/365: Red carnations.  Carnations get a bad rap because they’re ubiquitous in floral bouquets these days, but this picture and a few others I took turned out really lush and lovely.  The light really worked here.

130/365: Maybe the last day for the Valentine flowers.  This is snapdragon.

108/365: My big camera, my Nikon D300, was in the shop for what seemed like weeks, but it came back and I felt like commemorating the event.

109/365: My dog, Martha, gnawing on a bone. I love the way she holds it in place at the bottom. So cute.

110/365: This candle is usually not on the floor, but on the kitchen counter. I hope you feel better knowing that.

111/365: My grandmother had this platter and another one with a Paris theme in storage. I love them, but I haven’t figured out where they will go yet. But I took this for my mid-century loving friends, who would think it pretty cool.

112/365: The buds on the Star Magnolia shrub in my front yard are fuzzy. I love the way they last the winter like that, and in a few weeks, they will burst open in large white blossoms.

113/365: This fence is the view from my back porch. It glows during the golden hour. I like photos like this that show off depth of field (the term for how much or how little of the photo is in focus).

114/365: I bought this pillow for a buck at an antique mall. It is in excellent shape (sometimes these pillows harden up over time). I love the golden green color and the tufted buttons.

115/365: My sister-in-law (sort of) had a baby on this day. I was standing in the kitchen and idly thinking about the baby and how the world would change as he grows, and as I stood there I noticed the phone book. The phone book (and the reality of the “yellow pages”) are already almost obsolete in an age of 411 and Facebook and iPhones and all of that. By the time her son is in college, it’s hard to believe that phone books will still be printed in large quantities and left by your doorstep every year.

116/365: I bought two cheap pairs of glasses at Zenni Optical online, and this was the second pair. They turned out pretty well for the price. Another self-portrait.

117/365: Some family members gathered to celebrate my grandmother’s 81st birthday. I took a picture!

At the end of November, I posted Flickr calendar views of October and November. I’ve now made it a third of the way through this 365 Project! Can you believe that? Here are the calendar views for December and January. I made little images for both, but you can click on the images to go to Flickr.

Wow! This week is clearly a catch-up week for me. I got sick with the flu, and with the malaise and the recuperation, I haven’t been posting my 365 photos to Flickr or this blog for a few weeks. I still didn’t skip a day taking photos, even through the illness! But some of these are lacking in inspiration. I am really looking forward to the days growing longer in the coming months, because I’m exhausting my energy for night photos and indoor shots of things around my house. I need to branch out a little!

89/365:  Several inches of snow fell overnight, and my dog ran out first thing in the morning.  These tracks (complete with little loop-de-loop) were the first ones she made as she started her ‘perimeter check’ of the yard.  I love that she clearly changed her mind or caught a smell or there was some reason that this is what she did, and I am happy that I grabbed my camera.

90/365: I was going for a little 70s style here with the colors and the wood.  My kitchen has a 70s vibe even though it was built in the 1990s, and I like it.

91/365: This is a pretty swirly colorful bowl that I got for my birthday a few years ago.

92/365: The snow stuck around for a few days because the temperatures were very low.  I went for a walk at the Pinnacles Youth Area (north of Columbia, Missouri) and was greeted by some amazing icicles along the edge of this rock shelter.  So cool!  It looked like teeth.

93/365: This is a fountain in downtown Columbia.  The temperatures were very low, and an ice shell formed around the fountain, which was lit from below by a flood lamp.  It was really cool looking but hard to photograph.  This is my favorite shot of the attempts that I made.

94/365: One of my Christmas presents, a vintage plastic Beacon II camera.  It came with a leather case and a flash unit.  I don’t know if it works but it’s pretty cool.

95/365: This is a close-up photos of a blue shag pillow that I have that I love.  I like how this turned out.

96/365: Another cutting board shot, this time with an apple.  This is where I started getting sick, so the photos for the next few days got a little bit boring.

97/365: I set up this shot because I thought the pills would look pretty neat with backlighting, but I didn’t realize until I was processing the image that the water was not level in the glass.  I also wish that I’d chosen a better cloth color for the table.  I thought it would pop with the NyQuil, but it doesn’t really work very well.

98/365: I’m not sure what I was thinking.  I wanted to shoot something in the house, but inspiration had run out.  I liked the idea of a pattern with the toilet paper rolls, and the way the light would drop off between sounded interesting, but I didn’t pull it off here.  Oh well.  I was sick.

99/365: I was out late and came home through the fog, and took this photo just a few minutes before midnight.  This is the streetlight outside my house through the branches of a dogwood tree.  We had several days of fog after this, and I was really enchanted with the way the streetlights looked at night.

100/365:  100 days of pictures and I only missed one!  It was a foggy morning and I went to Capen Park to take some photos from this bluff, since I thought the perspective with the distance would make the fog work in the photo better.  Hmm.  I’m not sure this is the best shot from that day, but I like the expanse of this rock.  I should have gotten lower to the rock, I think.  I’m overthinking this.

101/365: I’m cat-sitting for my aunt, and this is one of her two orange marmalade tabby cats.  They are identical except in personality.  This one is far more outgoing than his brother.  I like his yellow eyes.

102/365: Streetlights outside my house in the mist.  I didn’t brighten this enough for it to work the way I wanted, but I still like the way the mist makes the streetlights look at night.

103/365: Self-portrait!  I bought some new glasses and wanted to post a picture of them because they’re weird and silly.

104/365: My friend is an obsessive tennis lover, and I had my camera stuff at his house so I took this picture of his hopper filled with tennis balls.  I like the colors.

105/365: This is a redo of a photo I took earlier in this 365 project.  It was kind of a throwaway photo, but other people really liked it.  I wanted to do it again when there would be some reflection on the street from the rain, so I went out to do this picture in the rain.

106/365: A photo of my house with some dramatic sunset clouds.  I reprocessed this photo a couple of times and I’m still not happy with it.  The problem with the 365 is that it happens *every day* and it’s hard to be creative every day.  But that’s the point of the project, to exercise my creativity even when it’s hard!  But that’s also my excuse because I’m not happy with this image because I didn’t take enough time to get it right.  Ugh.

107/365: Another bowl in my house.  I have a lot of clay things, like bowls and mugs and pitchers and vases.  This one is really well-made and I like the little swirl at the bottom of it.

74/365: I love this snowglobe, but it proved difficult to take a photo of a snowglobe.

75/365: Christmas Eve with my parents and my grandparents.

76/365: We spent Christmas Day baking! We made all kinds of cookies and treats, and a big project of mine was making cake balls. They were delicious.

77/365: We had one family Christmas event on December 26.

78/365: And another family Christmas event on December 27.

79/365: And right before Christmas, I bought this vintage 1960s aluminum Christmas tree and set it up. My fiber optic tree now has a place of honor in the front window.

* I missed my first 365 photo on Monday, January 28. I was really disappointed, but I am proud that I went 80 days without missing one.

81/365: We are getting a nice amount of snowfall this winter. Here was a pretty snow in the morning that covered the branches of the trees nicely. I stopped my morning routine to get this shot because the tree cover never lasts very long.

82/365: I decided to take self-portraits on the last day of every month, but this one on New Year’s Eve didn’t work out so well. My family is laughing at me in the back, and the focus is on them! But I like how that worked.

83/365: We did our family Christmas on New Year’s Day. I love this capture of this goofy grin on my sister’s face.

84/365: I took my camera to the dog park, just to see what I could see, and after a few pictures of snow tracks and random things, I realized that the snow blowing on the lake was making beautiful patterns. I took a lot of photos.

85/365: Snow tracks and grass in my front yard, with the sunset light giving it some color.

86/365: My woodpile on the back porch. I like the way the wood fits together, but I’m not very happy with this photo. I may try it again later.

87/365: I was distracted by the way the markers in the glass looked on my purple office desk.

88/365: It was Epiphany, the last day for a lot of Christmas lights. I like it when businesses leave things up until January 6. It was really bad weather, but I braved it to take a picture of the LED Magic Tree in Cherry Hill, which is pretty cool. There are three of these in town (as far as I know), and they’re all really neat.

65/365: I bought this Advent wreath a few years ago because it was pretty and on sale, but I have rarely used it.  I decided to shoot some pictures of it lit up, mostly because I want to put images like this on Getty, if I can.  But I also like to set up shots like this.  I’ve been doing it a lot for the 365 project.

66/365: The fifth night of Hanukkah.  I really like my new menorah, and it looks pretty neat with the living room furnishings.

67/365: I took an earlier image of oranges on a red tablecloth and loved it, and when my dad gave me a sack of oranges to take home, I couldn’t help but set this up with a green Fiestaware bowl on my red plaid Christmas tablecloth with the green wall of the kitchen nook right behind.  It looked so good together!

68/365: I bought this IKEA candleholder set many years ago, and it’s usually the centerpiece on the kitchen table.  Sometimes I trade out the tealights for different colors.  Right now, they’re all green.

69/365: I was home for lunch, and how fortunate that was!  Snow was falling but not sticking until I’d been there for awhile, and right before I left to go back to work, I realized that it was sticking to the trees and branches in the backyard in a lovely fluffy way.  Consequently, I was late getting back to work after lunch.

70/365: A little vignette of vintage items on my kitchen counter.  The radio works.  I love the cork pencil holder, which rotates on its little stand.

71/365: The snow at my parents’ house lasted through the weekend.  I like the tracks.

72/365: A friend of mine made some gingerbread cookies and shared them with me.  I took this photo before I ate them all up.

73/365: I got this as a present years ago after I pointed it out and said, “I want that.”  I love having it out all year, but I put it in a special place during Christmas, because it reminds me of Charlie Brown’s tree, bending over.  I think of it as the grown-up version of Charlie Brown’s tree.

53/365: My Christmas cactus is blooming.

54/365: This is my roommate, and she’s probably the best roommate I’ve ever had.

55/365: I will have to try to take a better picture of these glasses sometime, but I just purchased one to complete the set that I have. I was pretty excited.

56/365: I spent the evening putting up my parents’ Christmas tree. We always love the way it looks with just white lights and no ornaments.

57/365: I put up my own Christmas decorations.

58/365: And then I wasn’t happy with the photo I took, so I set it up again and took the same photo the next day with different lighting. I am happier with the second photo.

59/365: I have some pictures on display at the Performing Arts Center in Jefferson City through December 22, along with other members of the Jeff City Photo Club.

60/365: It was the first snowfall of the year, and I was out walking around downtown. My glasses started to fog up, so I had to take this picture somewhat blind. But it worked out.

61/365: I was so pleased with how the cottony “snow” worked for the background in this shot. It gives it a nice sense of texture.

62/365: The first night of Hanukkah with my new menorah.

63/365: I love the colors orange and red together. I know they’re supposed to clash, but I love them.

64/365: I was trying to capture the light winter blue of the sky with the paper snowflakes on the windows. This was the ultimate result.

View my Thanksgiving vacation through my 365 photos!

39/365: Homemade rolls for my work Thanksgiving party, made in my vintage blue snowflake pattern Pyrex.  This is the first time I’ve had success baking rolls in the vintage Pyrex, so it was something to celebrate.

40/365:  This streetlight is outside my house and I can see it from my kitchen window, but I took this picture outside with a long lens.

41/365: My Halloween decorations were still up.  Actually, they’re still up now.  I’m a lazy git.

42/365: Reflection of two past-peak orange trees on the shore of the larger of the Twin Lakes, taken from the Twin Lakes dog park.

43/365:  I did family photos for a crazy group, including this six-month-old!  He is adorable with this face.

44/365: The clouds and the waxing crescent moon were looking great this night, and I framed it so that Jupiter is visible in the bottom center of the photo.

45/365: The top of the dome of Jesse Hall, on the University of Missouri campus.

46/365: Dead grass has many colors!  This is in my backyard.

47/365: Hooray for the pumpkin pie!

48/365:  Beautiful weather after Thanksgiving.  I took a lot of pictures as the sun was setting and this was the one I chose for 365.  I liked the directional light from the setting sun.  This is why they call it the Golden Hour.

49/365:  Another beautiful day over Thanksgiving weekend.  I stopped to take pictures at a field east of Ashland, Missouri, where the dried weeds were backlit by the sun.  My Flickr friends tell me this is thistle.

50/365: My birthday eve, and my family celebrated with me by going to lunch at Flat Branch in Columbia.  This is the picture I took of my parents.  They took some pictures of me, but I can’t count those!

51/365: I went down to Eagle Bluffs Conservation Area on the shore of the Missouri River to take some self-portraits, since I’m doing self-portraits on the last day of every month.  I’m not sure this is my favorite one, but I do like it, and I processed it for the 365 with a vintage-y look though it was already washed out by the backlighting.

52/365: I’d been meaning to take this picture of the Islamic Center of Central Missouri for a few weeks, because I love the minarets and the crescent moons on top.  I knew it would look pretty cool with a nice sky behind it, and I got one on Tuesday night.  Yay!

Want to see something cool?  Flickr has a calendar view that can be organized by the date the photos were taken, so you can see all of my October 365 shots and all of my November 365 shots in calendar format.  Pretty neat!  I will post links to these at the end of every month.

I haven’t quit my 365 Project! But I can guess that you would have thought so, because it took me several days to upload some pictures from last week, and it’s been almost two weeks since I posted to this blog. I’ve been diligently taking a picture every single day. I’ve pretty much exhausted the photo opportunities of my living room furniture (which are, by the way, my most popular photos of this project over at Flickr), so hopefully I’ll be more clever about photo opportunities on boring weeknights as this goes on. But I haven’t quit! I haven’t missed a day yet.

36/365: This picture is immensely popular on Flickr. I think it showcases these chairs quite nicely, along with that color of blue.

37/365: I was headed out of town to Chicago on this day, and I hadn’t taken a shot, but the sky was gorgeous as it set, so I took this from my front yard.

28/365: I was in Chicago to take pictures of this lovely family. You’ll see more of these shots in a few days when I finish them and post some to the blog.

29/365: She is cute! She is 3!

30/365: This is one of the few house photos in which I have not used off-camera flash. I decided to just use the directional light from the lamp itself, since it highlighted the detail so nicely.

31/365: I pass by this hydrant sometimes on the way to and from work, and I kept noticing how nicely the colors of the orange leaves complemented the blue hydrant. I resolved to shoot it before it got too dark.

32/365: A houseplant. I don’t know what kind of succulent this is, but I like the spotty leaves.

33/365: I finally had my tripod out on the city streets, since I was downtown for a movie that night. I tried to shoot this sign from the top of the parking garage at Walnut and 8th Street, but I didn’t realize the new city building would block the sign from there. It used to be a pretty clear shot. I took this from the street next to the building instead, and used selective color so that only the sign was red (because otherwise there was some reddish incidental light that messed with the rest of the color).

34/365: These are Possumhaw Holly berries from a shrub in my yard.

35/365: I nearly forgot to take a picture on this day, and only remembered right at midnight. I did set up off-camera light to take this one, because I wanted to highlight the color in the ceramic.

36/365: An attempt at a fireplace photo. I may try this again with a little bit of lighting.

37/365: I moved into my kitchen, but there isn’t much to photograph in there. Never fear! I cannot possibly show you my whole house, because most of it is ugly!

38/365: I was home from work yesterday, and I kept noticing the way some of the red leaves from a neighbor’s tree looked against the still-green grass in my yard. Eventually I went outside to get a picture. It was raining at the time. It rained all day.

So the time changed last weekend, and now it’s nearly dark when I leave work at night.  I have to start bringing my camera every day and taking pictures before I get to work, or on lunch breaks.

19/365: I liked the way the multi-colored leaves looked in the gutter.

20/365:  This is a neighbor cat who has been coming to visit me lately.  I liked this picture of his cat strut.

21/365: Me on Halloween!  I decided that I would take a self-portrait at the end of every month as part of this project.

22/365: My television and stand.  I like to show off pictures like this on Flickr because there’s a strong community of people who are into this style of furniture there.

23/265: A desk in my living room.

24/365:  Finally, an outdoors picture since the clocks changed.  I took it on top of the parking garage near my office, with a tripod.  I will have start bringing a tripod to work for these shots.

25/365: A picture of my living room showing off my newly-upholstered couch.