I started an art journal swap with her over a year ago. We draw or paint something in one of two Moleskines—a small sketchbook and a Japanese book—and get togther periodically to swap them and create the next work. And so on, and so on. That project hasn’t moved as fast as either of us woud have liked, I think, but to our credit we haven’t stopped and are going to make it to the ends of the journals. At some point I want to scan the pages and display them in a section of this web site.

The new project is our first photography collaboration. I was inspired by another site where two friends, thousands of miles apart, posted pictures every day to a common site, and I figured we could do that, too. Not only were the shots really good, but also the project as a whole was impressive. Melinda and I knew we couldn’t realistically commit to shooting and posting a photo every day. But we decided we could shoot and post one photo every seven days. We first talked about it a year ago or more, but we finally started a month ago. We post one photo each to our site, Every Week, on Sundays. We just posted the shots for Week 4.

We decided the first week would be portraits of each other, shot after a lunch at Panera. The second week would be self-portraits. After that, it would be a free-for-all. Melinda is a great photographer. Go see for yourself.

One of the reasons why I wanted to get this project off the ground was to force both of us to shoot more photos, to create more, and in the process I hoped we would be thinking and seeing more artistically all the time. I struggled to find my rhythm in the third week, but last week I started to hit my stride, shooting more and looking for more opportunities. The project has had the same effect on Melinda—she told me that she’s been shooting a lot this week and even had a hard time choosing just one photo to post for Week 4. I’m really excited about it, because I can see that what I had hoped would happen is actually happening.

So watch and see what the upcoming year looks like through our lenses. I will still be posting occasional photos over in my Flickr photostream, but the majority of the best of my new and old shots will go into my new photo gallery here, which is just getting underway.