One of my regrets last year was that I completely fizzled out on my Project365 daily photo challenge in the end of December. I made it almost all the way through the year and then just…enh? I don’t even know what happened there.

Feeling discouraged, I knew I didn’t want to try daily photos again this year, so I deliberately didn’t take any photos on New Year’s Day, effectively preventing me from another Project365. But then I guess I got a little bee in my bonnet and wanted to do something and that something turned into Project52, a weekly photo challenge for 2015.

One of the problems I had with daily photos last year was that I didn’t really want to carry my DSLR with me every day, but I also didn’t like relying on iPhone photos, which were so often treated with filters and cropped into 640×640 squares via Instagram. Those were hardly what I’d been aiming for when I started the project, and the fact that I had to include so many of them to make the challenge disappointed me. I wanted to practice using my Nikon and, to some extent, also practice editing the photos afterward.

This year, I am going to attempt to hold to that idea: taking photos with my “real” camera and working with iPhoto (or someday perhaps Photoshop, if I decide to woman up and pay for it) to process them. The fact that I’ll only need to take one such photo per week should make this an achievable goal: no need to carry my Nikon with me every day; no preponderance of low-light indoor shots from within the walls of my home, taken because I didn’t carry my camera outside ever; no need to rely on Instagram snaps. If I ever do wind up using my iPhone for any of the photos, I’ll work with the full-size version rather than the Instagram filtered-and-cropped one.

So that’s my plan. Here are the first five weekly photos:

[1/52] Kombucha. In the healthy-eating reset that was January, an occasional kombucha, often served in a wine glass, was my substitute for a glass of happy-hour wine or whiskey.

[2/52] Jarred Salads. I wrote all about this already, but suffice it to say that sometimes Pinterest really does have a good idea.

[3/52] Straight Ahead. Forward motion. A sign on the hiking trail at our local forest ecology preserve, and a good thing to remember when things look murky.

[4/52] Lecture Hall. This photo was taken for a poster presentation I was working on with a colleague, wherein we needed to represent a common lecture hall and contrast it with a small, seminar-style classroom. This was the room where I taught my first ever large lecture course two or three years ago. The frowning faces suggested by the empty seats were, I thought, completely apropos.

[5/52] Blanket. Over Christmas, my MIL went through a bunch of old things they had around the house in order to see if we (or my brothers-in-law) wanted to have any of them. CW and I wound up taking home this blanket, made by his great-grandmother, and using it in our guest room. The bright, jaunty colors make me happy.