365 Days

of Self Portraits

By Nicole Hanusek

Book Preview

I finally finished the task of turning my 365 days of self portraits into a photo book. After looking at several book publishing sites that print on demand, I ended up going with Blurb. You have to download their software, but it was worth it. The app allowed me to connect to my Flickr account and the photos on my computer. The templates were easy to work with too. I could easily create my own and edit individual templates. And in the end they don’t charge a buttload for a finished book full of color photos. If you’re trying to make your own book, I would recommend trying out Blurb.

Oh yeah, and take a look at the book I made! It was fun to go through each day from a whole year. I only got sick twice, went on two wine vacations and two trips to different countries (Italy and Japan). What a fun and exciting year that was!

I actually made it through three hundred and sixty-five days worth of self portraits. There were so many times when I wanted to give up. In the beginning around 80-100 days and again in the early 300′s. But at that point I had gone too far to give up.

The hardest part was when I already got into bed and then remembered, “shit, my self portrait for today!” Then drag myself out of bed and take a half-assed, not-so-creative self portrait.

There were some really good ones in the mix too though. Here are some of my favorites from the project.

The 365th picture (below) involved having a bunch of friends over to take a picture of me from their very own unique angle at the same time. I then gathered all of the pictures and composed a (somewhat) Picasso-like montage of a last self portrait. I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out.

It was hard to make the mental switch to stop worrying about taking a picture every day. I kind of miss it. There were still some cool ideas on my list that I didn’t get to, so I’ll probably still do them… some day.

(Take a look at the picture on Flickr to see who took what)