Late in 2011, my brother showed me a cool iPhone app called Everyday. It’s a tool for creating time lapse movies from a collection of photos of the sort that you’ve probably seen online, like this one by one of the app’s developer’s Noah Kalina, or this one by the mysterious ClickFlashWhirr (who is much better looking and better able to stay still than me), this great one of a Pacific Crest Trail hiker, and this one of a hike and growing beard in China.
Anyway, so the app makes it easy, and I enjoy movies of this sort, so I thought I’d have a go at making my own. I made it until mid-February before I missed a day. It was about 1:00 am in the morning and I realized I missed my shot. From that point forward I took a more relaxed approach, trying to remember to get my photo every day, but not worrying too much if I missed one or two here and ther. In the end I captured 292 photos over 367 days (2012 was a Leap Year! And I included New Year’s Day 2013 to end the movie).
Beginning in October, I decided to let my beard grow through the end of the year. My beard had many motivations; partly a hiking beard, an Election mojo beard, some reason you’re not supposed to shave in November, an experiment to see what was left on top of my head after almost two years of wearing a close shave, and an opportunity to be Santa. My wife suffered horribly during these three months as my face became her nightmare. I had promised all along that it would be gone by New Year’s, but I never said it would go all at once. Trimming it bit by bit at the end of the year was one of the funnest parts of this effort.
It’s a lot to see, cramming 366 days into 30 seconds, and there is much there you can easliy miss. The individual photos are all posted in this Flickr set if you’re interested in a closer look at any of them.