I got a new camera for a combo birthday/Christmas present this year — a Nikon D3000, the one thing I really, really wanted. Needless to say, I am just loving it and I find myself wanting to take pictures of everything.

I was goofing around getting ready to go out on New Year’s Eve when I tried to take a self portrait and ended up with this shot:

It didn’t quite come out as I’d planned. The focus is off, I cut off the top of my head, and I accidentally included the messy bed in the background where the dog was playing Wrestle the Blankets. I like the picture for those reasons — you can see the dog making trouble and me kind of giggling about it, which is a pretty good reflection of life at my house.

[I should also note that, coming from over five years of anonymous blogging where I never, ever posted a photo of myself, this feels extremely weird. But there you go! It’s me.]

Since it’s been a very long time since I took a photography class (sophomore year of college, back in the dark ages of actual FILM cameras, my god), I’ll need to re-learn some things about light metering and filters and what have you. I also know next to nothing about digital post-processing. I use iPhoto and have no idea about anything like Photoshop, Lightroom, or Aperture, nor which one of these I should even buy — any ideas? But I mainly need practice.

So of course I decided to enlist in Project 365, where participants try to take a photo a day for an entire year. You can actually start this any time, but I started on New Year’s Day and have three photos so far in my Project 365 flickr set. I may not be posting them to flickr every day, but I’ll be taking one photo a day and then processing & posting them as I can. You can keep up with this either on flickr or via the thumbnails in the sidebar here, where the three most recent photos will always be displayed. I probably won’t blog each and every picture here, but if there’s one I especially like or one that has a good story to accompany it, I’ll put it here, too.

To start out, here are my first three photographs (click on any photo to take you to the flickr version):

[1/365] Couch Napping

I was trying to get comfortable on the couch for a good New Year’s Day hangover recovery nap, but the dog wanted to stare me down.

[2/365] Dough

Making pizza dough at home. I do enjoy kneading balls. OF DOUGH, YOU PERV.

[3/365] Balls!

Uh, more balls. Unintentionally. I took down the Christmas tree today, and these were some of my ornaments, waiting to be put away.

I hope I am able to keep up with the daily photo all year — it’s a big project, and one that’s not easy to complete. But I’m just so frakking excited about my new camera that I should be able to do it. Hopefully by December the overall quality will have improved. Here’s to 2010, the year of photos!