These photos represent each day of Gavin's first year of life - 367 to be exact since 2008 was a leap year and his first birthday is included as well. Not long before Gavin was born, I got the crazy idea of taking Gavin's photo every day of his first year. Wouldn't it be neat, I thought, to be able to someday show Gavin a photo from each day during his most formative year. Never again in our lives do we develop and grow so much in just one year so this seemed to be the perfect way to capture the changes.

Throughout the year, I posted the photos daily on Flickr. Now that the collection is complete, I have added them here to Gavin's web site and created a better interface for browsing the images. View Gavin's first year of photos!

It's interesting to see the the compositional changes through the year. For the first two months, almost every photo is a head shot. Gavin simply didn't do much and his little face was just so darn cute! The "couch shots" became a habit by his second month when I'd often prop him up on the couch for his daily head shot (February 23rd):

Sometimes, I tried disguising the couch by putting a pillow behind him (February 24th):

Heading into his third month, he was able to hold his head up so we often took advantage of the late afternoon sun streaming through the bedroom windows for a tummy photo on the bed (March 18th):

As he became more active, there were more interesting settings and opportunities to take photos. I started to capture his developmental milestones, like cutting his first tooth (May 26th):

And I started taking my camera out of the house more like this trip to Target when Gavin sat in the cart for the first time (June 29th):

Eventually, the photo composition became a far cry from those early headshots (August 24th):

And Daddy and Gmummy took a few of the photos as well!

While a great keepsake for Gavin, this was also a way for me to learn to take better pictures. When you take a photo of the same subject usually in the same setting (our living room almost every weekday) every day, you're forced to avoid boredom by becoming a little adventurous. I became more comfortable just capturing Gavin as he is and not trying to create the perfect portrait studio image every day. November 19th created a photo that no professional photographer would ever take, but it perfectly captured Gavin's quirky behavior at ten months old!

I'm still not sure what the final plan for these 367 photos will be. Maybe, they will only ever be part of Gavin's web site or I may eventually create a photo album or book. For now, I find myself browsing through them on my computer quite often, reminiscing about how quickly Gavin grew through the course of the year yet how long each of the phases seemed at the time. Please feel free to do the same . :)