What people photograph every day
Not everything is worth a photograph once a day. A few things are, and they are oddly specific: the ones that change too slowly to notice, and the ones that only survive if somebody else can see you keeping them. One page for each.
A habit
A streak nobody can see is a promise to the one person who already agreed to let you off. This is what changes when somebody else watches you keep it.
A child
You are the worst-placed person alive to notice your own child changing. This is the instrument that does it for you.
Your own face
A mirror is structurally unable to show you this: a thing observed every day appears not to move at all.
What you eat
Logging a meal is data entry, which is why nobody keeps it up. A photograph is two seconds and no arithmetic.
Hair
A centimetre a month: too slow to see in a mirror, exactly fast enough to photograph.
Training
A before-and-after pair proves nothing. Three hundred frames cannot be staged.
Why a day is the right interval
Weekly is too slow to be a habit and too coarse to be a film. Hourly is a chore. A day is the largest unit that still attaches to something you already do — a shower, a commute, a last look at the phone — and the smallest one that produces enough frames to play back as motion by the end of a season.
Ninety days is about eleven seconds of film. A year is closer to a minute. Neither is long; both are longer than any single photograph can be.
Two things every one of these pages shares
The frames are lined up. Each photograph is cropped around whatever the album is about, so the series reads as one thing changing rather than as a slideshow of near-misses. That is the difference between footage and a folder.
And the frames are kept. Every day's frame stays for good on a free account; the original photograph is kept for ninety days free and for as long as you keep the account on Selfeed Pro. Most apps that show you a photograph today are designed to have lost it by tomorrow — that is the point of them. It is not the point of this one.
Start with today
Whatever you end up photographing, the first frame is the same thirty seconds. Selfeed is open in the browser now, no install needed.
Take today's photo