Happy New Year, my sweet scrappy friends, and welcome to January 2024!

I love the start of a new year. It’s a chance to begin anew, to give thought to what’s working and what’s not, and decide what we might like to do differently going forward. That applies to every aspect of life: home life, work life, spiritual life, and even our creative life.

Around this time last year, I talked about how to plan for scrapbooking success, and one of the options is to take on an overarching project for the year. I love the idea of participating in a Photo-A-Day challenge. In fact, I’ve tried taking it on a couple times, but I generally get about a week in and discover I’m already behind, which leaves me frustrated and discouraged.

But what if we took on a photo challenge that was more laid back and flexible? One where you didn’t have to shoot an image each and every day, but instead had a shorter list of photos to capture over the course of the month?

We’re calling it our Baker’s Dozen Photo Challenge and I hope you’ll play along! Each month, I’ll give you a list of thirteen prompts, and you’ll use them to inspire your photography.

January’s Photo Prompts

A Little Inspiration

Here’s a few ideas to help get you started…

Self Portrait

Take a quick-and-easy selfie with your phone, and you’ve got an image of yourself to start the year:

Snuggle

My grandson sat on my lap to watch cartoons, and the two dogs jumped up for a snuggle. I grabbed my phone, turned on the wide-angle (0.5) lens, and captured the moment like this:

A New Beginning

New computer – who dis? While building my new desktop computer from scratch, I snapped this image holding the CPU over the motherboard. Definitely a new beginning!

Icy

Is the weather cold and icy where you live? Capture it with a shot like this:

On the other hand, if you’re in the southern hemisphere – or anywhere warm – you can interpret “icy” like this instead:

Layers

Don’t wait for the house to be perfectly clean before you snap a photograph. Capture an image of real life – like I did when shooting the layers upon layers of fabric scraps I needed to sort, fold, and store.

Three of a Kind

Find three of something and shoot it. Do you craft and create in a medium other than digital art? Whether you knit, crochet, paint, or sew, be sure to capture the end result of your hard work – like these dresses I made for three special little girls:

Join us!

I hope you’ll join us on this journey to being more purposeful about our photography and capturing more images in 2024. As you create these photographs, I encourage you to share them wherever you feel comfortable doing so. If you post them on social media, use the hashtag #ssdphotochallenge – and when you scrapbook them, be sure to share your completed layout with us in The Gallery. Happy shooting!