On February 9, 2012, I turned 10,000 days old. When you think about it, that’s actually a pretty significant milestone, because each 10,000 days represents 27 years and change. More precisely, it’s your 27th birthday plus roughly 20 weeks. 27 years later, you’d be 54 and after that, 82 years old. If you’re lucky, you’ll see your 40,000th day at 109 years old, but no one has lived to see even 5,000 more days let alone the 50,000 day milestone. When you think about life like that, it seems more precious. Then you look at the next milestone at 100,000 days and it’s nearly unfathomable. Just 100,000 days ago, it was April 26, 1748. The United States hasn’t even reached that milestone! And you can forget comprehending living 1 million days, putting you at 717 BC – only 36 years after the founding of Rome.

Yes I find these dates and numbers fascinating when they are broken down like that, but knowing when you turn 10,000 days old isn’t exactly a monumental occasion. Upon learning it after a quick inquiry on Wolfram Alpha ([birthday] plus 10,000 days) in 2009, I marked my calendar, making no official plans otherwise. More than two years later, I got a notification from my past self about the approaching date of February 9, 2012 and thought I should start a 365 project to commemorate the occasion. For those who don’t know what a 365 project is, it’s basically a daily challenge photographers do to take one picture per day for a year. Most people start on January 1st or their birthday, but I figure if you’re going to measure in days, why not start on day 10,000? And so with my trusty Canon Rebel XTi I photographed a picture of a clock in my parents’ basement. I’ll be honest, I wanted something more monumental, but it was a fine first entry to this daily photo challenge. I called the project 10Kplus365, which feels more like some marathon than a photo project.

By day two, I came down with something and I nearly called the project quits before it became a series. I pressed on and photographed a pill before ingesting it. And I powered through that illness while capturing a sort of introduction to my life as it was in the early days of 10Kplus365. Before I knew it, I got a job and was now faced with the challenge of how to photograph my daily life with the taboo of bringing a camera to an office run by old school businessmen. At that time in my life, I was a recent graduate of Monmouth University, still living at home, and looking to get moving. As you might have guessed by doing the math, I did take my sweet time getting through school, but I think it worked out for the better. With an associates in graphic design under my belt, I got my bachelors in communication with a minor in photography. By 2012, I had already been into photography for about a decade, but at Monmouth I really honed in on that skill. It was all around a good time to start a project of this nature.

2012 was a progressive year for me so being able to photograph things as life sort of unfolded felt pretty good. I started the year unemployed and mostly broke with a tired, old entry level camera. I had a good girlfriend who put up with my shenanigans for four years and though I was still at home under my parents’ roof, I was hoping to move out. The year finished with a new Canon 5D Mark III (my dream camera), a fiancée, a dog, and the prospect of having independence. All of it was captured along the way.

Because 2012 turned out pretty good and this photo project was more or less looking good to me, I decided to keep going after February 9, 2013 but changed the project from 10Kplus365 to 10,000+. I captured more good things and big changes like my new niece, househunting, moving, wedding planning, etc. My company put me in charge of a 3D printer and it gave me the opportunity to travel to Las Vegas and Miami for trade shows, which also gave me some interesting photo ops. One of which was on the flight itself to Miami when I captured the newly topped off One World Trade Center shimmering in the morning light. This photo was soon published in a special issue of Time Magazine and solidified my justification for continuing 10,000+ indefinitely. The thought of missing cool yet fleeting moments like that deterred me from ever going anywhere without my camera. Some call this FOMO, or the fear of missing out. This progress remained steady throughout 2014, after moving to Somerville, getting married, going on our honeymoon, and capturing so many novel things most people generally go through. It was a good time for a long term 365 project.

Life basically settled down in 2015. By then my big project at work, a 300 page catalog, was finished, the 3D printer hype was losing its luster, the novelty of homeownership was wearing out, and the routines that are a part of life were starting to cycle. I made a promise to myself to keep shooting 10,000+ no matter what. Life does have its ups and downs, and often life runs into ruts where you are kind of on autopilot just trying to survive. I started this 365 project looking to sharpen my skills in photography, but it evolved into a life logging project. There are many, many mundane moments throughout those early days of great progress, but as progress switched to maintenance, it did feel like the project got harder to shoot. 2015 had many nice opportunities for photography but the project was getting more difficult to shoot as those moments were few and far between. 

As we entered 2016, 10,000+ was maturing and evolving into something beyond photography. It was like a daily photo essay. No words. Just pictures. Some good moments and some blah moments. There are days when the photo of the day comes natural and days where I feel like I’m forcing it. I would question the project and it would get philosophical. Like is this photo of a flower significant to my day when I wouldn’t bother with it at all if I wasn’t searching for something to quickly photograph? Then of course there is the act of posting a photo of the day, which is something I did on Twitter and Facebook since the beginning. I would usually post each daily photo the following day and I eventually prefixed it with “Day 1x,xxx” and a title. This helped me keep track but sometimes the titles would feel forced and stupid. If we went away, I would definitely keep shooting my daily photo, but I wouldn’t post anything until we got home. I mostly refuse to edit photos on the go. Even if they’re not that good, I still like to edit on my PC. So in those cases, I would fall behind. By 2016, I was falling behind on my postings more, and the more I fell behind, the more the work accumulated. And of course there are other obligations in life that need my attention far more than editing a photo of some bug or a scrap of paper.

Then the undefined but inevitable moment I dreaded happened: a good friend of ours suddenly passed. It was a devastating loss and a painful time that still hurts when I think about it. In the context of my 365 project it became a moment of uncertainty. It was a moment I mentally prepared for in any given situation. There were milestones of all kinds captured in 10,000+ that I happened to be a part of, so death, in a general way of thinking about it, was just another milestone. No. It was in a sense, but it was so much harder to accept it as reality in practice. I guess you can tell I had no real way to gauge it at the time. This was beyond me or my silly photo project no one was forcing me to do. I felt numb, but I captured what made sense to capture in the weeks that followed with no real fanfare. This moment made me look long and hard at the four years of daily consecutive photos I captured thus far. How fleeting it all is, but to me this daily photo project is important, and good day or bad, I should keep going. My friend Joe respected and supported what I did. I don’t think he would have ever wanted me to stop. So I didn’t. 

And as 2016 came to an end, life felt more real for some reason. It’s hard to put into words. Life just felt different. The project became a symbiotic part of my life. I defined it and it defined me. Though I kept posting this series to Facebook, I decided to delete my account. This part of me felt phony. Some of the relationships I had there felt disingenuous and forced. Drama ran rampant. I didn’t want to be part of it anymore. For the project, this was a major turn. Without a place for this series to be seen, did it matter if I kept shooting it? Is photography worth doing without an audience or likes? I think so, but don’t get me wrong, it does feel good when people enjoy something you made. And to be fair, Instagram was better for this kind of work, although I never shared my 365 project (aside from a few highlights) on that platform. Leaving Facebook did have fallout for some reason and strained some dwindling relationships. A number of people got upset with me and thought I blocked them. Other relationships pretty much fell into obscurity without Facebook keeping them on life support. And some other things happened I’d rather not mention, but let’s just say some of the subject matter in this series shifted gears quite a bit. The end of 2016 and beginning of 2017 marked a distinct new era for this project and for me as a photographer. 

Capturing a 365 photo project with no real audience seems unusual in this era of social media in which FOMO reigns supreme and where people ask, “If it happened and you didn’t share it, did it really happen?” And unless you are some jetsetter constantly traveling the world, capturing a daily photo well beyond the one year mark also gets very repetitive and more challenging with disappointments you’d rather not want to remember. In a post-Facebook life, 2017 offered me some really cool moments, many of which became my photo of the day. As I fell behind in my postings on Twitter, I opted to just share some of the highlights but also decided to keep this project on my website. I found a good way to display the series and update batches of it from time to time. As 10,000+ entered its fifth and sixth years I could honestly say it finally hit its stride in a daily snapshot of life. In 2018 we moved, giving me some fresh content of the home selling process. By 2019, I acquired a drone, giving me a new way to look at the world and even revisit past ideas and scenes, but from above. But overall the photo project kept moving. I embraced the repetitive nature of it and realized it’s just impossible to capture something totally unique every single day while also trying to live a normal enough life.

2020… We all know the story. I guess if you’re reading this from the distant future, look up the COVID-19 pandemic. Yeah. Anyway, the pandemic disrupted pretty much everything, but presented the world in a new perspective. It wasn’t just empty streets, people with masks, or toilet paper shortages, but the concept of solitude and navigating a world thrown off its axis. All of which I captured from my point of view. In addition to the pandemic and a little before it started, 2020 rocked my world as my mom got sick. Like my friend Joe passing in 2016, this was another mental exercise I anticipated in some form if I wanted to capture every single day from my point of view. You can’t ignore these things, but you don’t want to really address it. Photography is for weddings, birthdays, and celebrations of life – not moments of weakness, pain, suffering, or death. Everyone wants to see your new puppy. No one wants to see your old dog get put down. But these things happen regardless of a camera present. I don’t want to have sad moments or go through hard times. No one does. But as a photographer, how do you capture the essence of a difficult time?

My mom recovered and my project showed perseverance. 2020 ended and 2021 said, “Hold my beer.” 365 more days of photographing the novelty of hard times and hoping for the best to feeling like I am documenting the unraveling of society from within my lockdown bubble. Had I started a 365 project in 2020 or 2021, I probably would have stopped. Between house problems, my job loss, moments of doubt, nearly dying in the woods, and a world gone mad, I wondered why I kept doing it. Ultimately I decided to keep photographing each day because some voice inside of me knows this matters in some way. Not in some delusion of grandeur, but that one day I will need to look back on this time, and times in the past, to see when things were good and when things felt rock bottom.

For me, 10,000+ has touched on so many themes and experiences, it is hard for me to just stop. I suppose one day I will take my last photo for this series. Will it end with a bang or a whimper? Will I get to edit it? Where will I be when this happens? I can’t say for as much as when I started this project on February 9, 2012, I had no idea I would move twice well outside of where I grew up, get three dogs, have any success in photography, travel as much as I did, fly a drone, use a 3D printer, see an eclipse, or anything. What will February 9, 2032 look like? I don’t know, but I marked my calendar for that day on day 17,305. Even if I don’t do this anymore, I want to be able to look back at this moment and see all of this, and maybe even give an update. Here’s hoping for good things in the coming decade!

Yes, that’s the same clock from the first photo.