
He Took a Polaroid Every Day, Until the Day He Died - bluesmoon
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/15131
======
angstrom
This is something that's never far from my mind; the unknown sliver of time we
have. I think about it when I wonder if I'm saving enough money for the long
term vs spending it on some experience that will enrich my life in the near
term. What's the point in saving for retirement if you could be gone in 20,
10, 5 years, or tomorrow? Everyone's idea of a rich and rewarding life is
different, yet shares many commonalities: friends, family, work, recreation,
and ultimately how those combine to define a rewarding life.

It's tempting to take my camera and do a similar, but different, collection of
memories. If nothing else it's a nice web of memories to leave your loved ones
and a nice side project that takes little time. Also, supposing you do live
beyond 80 or 90 it would be all the more interesting.

~~~
quizbiz
www.blipfoto.com is a fantastic community for posting a daily photo. It's the
whole idea of the site.

    
    
       This is something that's never far from my mind; 
    

How? It's so easy to take things for granted. Do you really wake up and remind
yourself that today could be your last?

~~~
angstrom
Not everyday, but certainly in the course of a week I'll think about it. It's
a good reminder to focus on what's important and it keeps me from whining
about the insignificant daily trials that really amount to life's nuisances.

Interesting link, I created an account and will mess with it some more. I
already pay for a flickr account. The site would have to be better for this
task for me to really use it to the fullest. I already do some recreational
photography with a Rebel EOS T2i, so this would be a side benefit of something
I already do anyhow.

~~~
ecargnfx
Agreed. That's why the whole FMyLife irritates me so much--there are bigger
things than those trivialities to fret over. There are actually a few Steve
Jobs' quotes I find greatly inspiring that touch upon that.

""If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly
be right." ...I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If
today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do
today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I
know I need to change something."

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the
trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is
no reason not to follow your heart."

Right?

~~~
sliverstorm
fml is, really, just a humor site and a place to vent when some perfect storm
of events comes over your life. No matter how hard you try to remember the
temporary nature of life, most people will still get upset were some of those
things to happen, and rightly so.

Like this one: Today, my package from Maxim Electronics came in the mail. My
parents thought the package was from Maxim magazine. I am now grounded for
months, and they threw away hundreds of dollars of electronics. FML

~~~
ecargnfx
Haha, yeah I know what you mean. I just meant the instances where it became so
mainstream that people around me were saying such things as "I chipped my
nail. FML" which was very irritating.

------
bryanh
This camera (the SX-70) is actually a really neat little pop-up Polaroid
camera. The Impossible Project actually re-leased an old Polaroid film
factory, bought the equipment before it was scrapped and (I believe) hired a
few of the old workers to keep the film in production. Needless to say, it is
very, very cool. You can pick up an SX-70 for about $100 on eBay and a three
pack of film for $50ish.

<http://www.the-impossible-project.com/>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaroid_SX-70>

A surprisingly worthwhile & technical ad:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jaiq_ZZ_eM>

~~~
mgunes
The ad, or mini-documentary, is by the great designers Charles and Ray Eames.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_and_Ray_Eames>

------
todayiamme
It's so beautiful.

Those polaroids aren't just moments frozen in time, but memories immortalized.
I know this sounds quite corny, but in a way this is a crude summation of the
things he truly left behind. It has everything his moments of happiness,
sadness, people that made his life worth living, his work. Everything.

Beautiful.

[edit: This is something so obvious, but it takes time to sink in. Is this
what life is? When you see his choices, the women he fell in love with. How he
married that someone a few weeks before his death. It just puts everything
into sharp perspective. Is this life?

Wow.]

------
quizbiz
To me, I think the most powerful thing in the whole post is at the very end it
says

    
    
       Update 4: Jamie Livingston has been added to Wikipedia.
    

Man takes pictures daily to express his creativity. Those close to him work
hard to make it public. A single blogger happens to find out about it and
recounts the creativity. The greater social web learns about the life of Jamie
Livingston and, in turn, the small expression of his creativity will be felt
forever. At least it will be known to whoever wants to search. Forever.

~~~
Kliment
This is an excellent argument against the deletionist faction on Wikipedia.
Would this be considered notable?

~~~
quizbiz
The fact that the article could be deleted didn't even occur to me. If every
human being did this, it wouldn't be notable but how is it not notable? Why is
there even a "deletionist faction" on Wikipedia? Not storage costs...

~~~
nkassis
I agree, I find the whole idea of deleting non-notable articles from wikipedia
as idiotic. The whole process of determining non-notable things is a joke.
They could at least deprecate the articles to a sub wiki, like a universe
(compared to main on ubuntu). Deleting is just dumb.

------
hoggle
This is beautiful not only because it reminds me to stop working. It's sunday
and life shouldn't only be work. Bye HN.

------
InfinityX0
For those saying "this makes me want to appreciate life more. or want to
splurge now at the possible potential of death, soon." - I say to you, be
rational.

These kinds of articles are examples of the availability heuristic - "in which
people predict the frequency of an event, or a proportion within a population,
based on how easily an example can be brought to mind."

Although every little emotional piece of content relative to death makes us
think a little harder about our own mortality, it is still in our best
interests to plan for the future. This article does not decrease our life
expectancy.

If you want to somehow balance extremes, look at your average life expectancy
based on things like living conditions and genetics, cut it down five years,
then appropriately plan your financial and life goals around that new,
tempered (and likely preemptive) end date.

Your friend dies in a car crash today. Your mother is diagnosed with cancer
tomorrow. Fortunately, life is no less fragile than it was yesterday, and with
all certainty, it is actually less so with continued medicinal developments
and ongoing life-extending research.

Yes, this is powerful. Yes, it shoulld make you appreciate life a little more.
No, it should not offer justification for a life of poverty and
shortsightedness.

------
gwern
Long-term projects are so rare. It takes real insight to carry out a project
like this before digital cameras came around and made taking pictures too
cheap to measure.

I recently got a laptop with a built-in webcamera. Once I got it working with
Ubuntu, I thought, why not have the webcam take a picture every day or so?
Ultimately I set it, via cron, to take a picture and a screenshot every hour
that the lid is open, like so:

    
    
         @hourly if grep open /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID0/state; then import -quality 80 -window root png:$HOME/photos/webcam/xwd-`date \+\%\s`.png && optipng -o9 -fix `ls -t ~/photos/webcam/*.png|head -1`; fi
    
         @hourly if grep open /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID0/state; then fswebcam --resolution 1280x1024 -S 2 -F 3 ~/photos/webcam/`date \+\%\s`.jpg && jpegoptim -m80 `ls -t ~/photos/webcam/*.jpg|head -1`; fi
    

(Check for lid being open, use imagemagick/fswebcam to grab an image, output a
date-stamped file, and then optimize it - saves space like 40% for the
screenshots, not so much for the webcam. It doesn't matter so much when a few
weeks has yielded about 60MB, but it will help in the long run.)

Another long-term project I'm trying is recording predictions and my
confidence in them: <http://predictionbook.com/users/gwern>

Presumably this will teach me exactly how foolish I was when I was younger,
and what strange beliefs I held about the future. world

~~~
dman
cool stuff!! i am paying tribute to your idea the cron job for webcams in the
best way possible - by imitating it. Also predictionbook seems nice as do your
predictions.

------
jl6
I've been going 10 years so far at something similar, and while I've taken a
lot more than one photo a day on average, I'm still working on a mechanism to
extract the interesting ones from the documentary chaff. I am trying to attack
the problem by using extensive metadata to organize along different
dimensions, but the resulting explanatory notes sort of ruin the magic of the
mystery:

<http://james.lab6.com/photos/>

------
wallflower
If you found these photos fascinating, you may find Vivian Maier's photos
interesting. A street photographer from the 1950s to 1990s. Discovered at an
auction. Tens of thousands of undeveloped rolls.

Memento mori

<http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com/>

------
soyelmango
Ah, very inspiring, and reminds me of the quote by John Waters: _"Without
obsession, life is nothing."_

------
kevruger
Pretty amazing guy. I wanted to question how big of a ny mets fan he was
living in the 80s. So I went to October 27, 1986 - and yep there he was. What
a great shot of the celebration at Shea Stadium.

------
growt
Dead at 41, makes me think about life.

------
nuttendorfer
Actually inspires me to start something similar

------
truebosko
For those inspired to try something like this, posterous is a pretty good tool
simply because it's so simple to email a photo to it after taking it with an
iPhone or similar device.

------
GFischer
It reminds me of similar trends of people who photograph what they eat:

<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/dining/07camera.html>

or that they photograph themselves every day, then post time-lapsed videos on
YouTube.

I realize this misses the emotional point of these series - this was a more
artistic undertaking, but still...

Also, to those suggesting this is a good idea.. it's already happening.
Nowadays people's life albums are being shared on Facebook and other social
websites... there was a great post about how we will feel more keenly our own
mortality when our online "friends" start to die.

(see:
[http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1932803,00....](http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1932803,00.html)
)

------
johnnyg
What a great Sunday morning post. Thank's bluesmoon.

------
andrewbaron
Awesome article, I updated the photo-a-day entry with this work at
<http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/photo-a-day>

------
mikek85
DOLLY! WILL YOU GET A POLAROID OF THAT?

:)

------
twidlit
Very inspiring. coincidentally we are building something that lets anyone
create, store and share your life in pictures and features to keep you
motivated. its at piclyf.com and gonna launch this month.

~~~
dman
imo its not in very good taste to promote your product on this thread.

~~~
sliverstorm
Unless the spot is very subtle, in context and well executed.

(Which his was not)

~~~
twidlit
haha, yeah well lesson learned. :)

------
swah
He died poor after having spent more than 300k in expensive Polaroid films.

~~~
sorbus
18 years of photographs, around 6570. Currently, 16 exposures for the SX-70
(the camera he used) cost $72 on ebay. That puts the cost of 6570 polaroid
pictures today at a bit less than $30,000 - and they would have been cheaper
13 years ago, when he died. There's also no evidence from the pictures shown
in the article that he died poor.

~~~
mnutt
And the price right now is so high because Polaroid stopped making the film a
couple of years ago. Before that, film was a little over $1/picture.

