"I've learned that the art of collecting is good enough in and of itself."

There's a lot to be said for creative habit. Spending a few minutes on a side project each day—as long it's done religiously—can add up to more output at the end of a year than the occasional all-nighter.

Here four offbeat efforts shed light on the details of day-to-day life. From food, happiness and transportation to aging, they're proof that you can produce something powerful with only a few minutes a day.

Travis Ruse: Express Train
www.travisruse.com
Like many registered Democrats, Travis Ruse found himself completely frustrated after the last presidential election. But rather than spend four years stewing about the news headlines, he decided to put down the paper and start taking a closer look at the world around him. It didn't take long for the Inc. magazine photo editor to settle on a more defined goal: He launched a photoblog and decided to document his daily commute between Park Slope, Brooklyn, and midtown Manhattan.

The project started in November 2004, and Ruse has been taking pictures five days a week ever since. "I felt like I could use this photoblog to reach out to people across the world," he says. "These are the people in New York City. We're working class people, and we look just like everyone else." It's an effort to forge connections and paint a clearer picture of average New Yorkers—who Ruse says often feel like targets. He posts an image each weekday, and they capture people of every age and ethnicity through engaging compositions.

Before this effort, Ruse, a former freelance photographer, had largely given up on shooting. Now technology allows him to squeeze these personal images into the snippets of time left between work and fatherhood. There's none of the expense involved with film photography, and the Web lets him access an audience without beating on the doors of galleries or book publishers. He simply makes the pictures he wants and shares them with the folks who stop by his site—typically 4,000 a day.

Much of the project's strength lies with breadth and repetition. While many of the images are quite stunning, Ruse isn't trying to rival iconic subway photography. He's simply creating a visual journal of one commuter's personal experience. "I have my camera with me everyday," he says. "Sometimes I say, 'I don't feel like taking a picture.' As an artist, it's a challenge. How can I make this picture different? How can I tell a story? If you stick with a subject, hopefully, you'll get past the obvious pictures."

Jonathan Keller: The Adaption to My Generation
www.c71123.com/daily_photo
There's a certain Twilight Zone quality to Jonathan Keller's daily photo project. When you see hundreds of his images lined up at once, they start to resemble a yearbook for a high-school with only one student. Or perhaps the collective mug shots of a very unlucky criminal. Keller, a graduate student at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, has taken a photo of himself every day for the past eight years. (There was one lapse early on when he worked as a janitor in Antarctica.)

Each image is a simple head-and-shoulder shot set against a white background. Keller holds his arm out, frames the image on his digital camera's screen and snaps away. He never smiles, because his expressionless face is the easiest way to achieve a blank canvas. "I'm obsessive compulsive," he says. "I will do this for the rest of my life." Quite literally, this is an effort that ends only with its creator's death, and it's this cumulative data set that gives the project real heft.

There's no simple answer for why Keller keeps up his picture taking, and he doesn't have a clear memory of the idea's genesis. Nonetheless, he and his site visitors have made some interesting discoveries: Keller doesn't change his shirt everyday, and he became really thin when he trained for a marathon. It's also fascinating to figure out how long it took him to grow a mustache or make the shift from short hair to long. Plus, Keller is starting to notice the long-term changes in his appearance. "It's going to be really interesting when I start to lose my hair," he says.

While these daily photos haven't directly influenced his design work, Keller has discovered something else: "I've learned that the art of collecting is good enough in and of itself."

Tucker Shaw: Everything I Ate
Flipping through the pages of Everything I Ate, there's an almost an endless supply and variety of food. Late-night bowls of cereal. Take-out pizza. Meals shared with friends. It seems almost impossible that Tucker Shaw ate all this chow by himself, especially after you skip ahead to his slender author photo. His book is a year-long diary of personal food consumption, and it began life as an unusual side project.

When Shaw started obsessively photographing his snacks and meals in January 2004, he was working as a teen advice columnist for Alloy.com. He'd always been enamored with food and was more likely to take pictures of what he ate on vacation than what he saw. "Food is a really strong memory trigger for me," he says. So in late 2003, he came up with the idea to take snapshots of everything he ate for an entire calendar year. "I like to set myself little goals," he says. "I knew it would take discipline, but it wouldn't necessarily be difficult."

There's something surprisingly intimate about these tiny images, which are arranged by date and come with brief notes on when, where and what was eaten. "I wanted to create something that was a straightforward record without too much emotion," Shaw says. "I sort of had this little image in my head of someone digging up the ruins of New York City thousands of years from now and going, 'Oh, wow.'" Collectively, the photos form a rare, in-depth glimpse into someone else's life and make the reader stop to think about his or her own eating habits.

After Shaw's project found its way into The New York Times, he thought it might have legs and put together a book proposal that was eventually picked up by Chronicle. He also learned a lesson that's helped increase his writing time. "I think creatively there's a discipline that's so important," he says. "It's one thing to be a creative person and have creative ideas. It's another to produce." And in an ending that's truly poetic, all this food cataloguing helped land him a new job—dining critic at the Denver Post.

Aimee Sealfon Eng: My Happiness Project
www.myhappinessproject.blogspot.com
After a false start in 2005, Aimee Sealfon Eng revived her happiness project this past summer. She was in the middle of a move to a smaller apartment and needed something creative to boost her mood. This project's simple premise—documenting one thing that makes her happy each day—seemed like the perfect solution. "It's finding something wonderful in the everyday," says the art director at And Partners in New York. "Having to look for something really elicits the joy. It's internal work."

This time around she switched tactics, moving from an unwieldy InDesign document to a public blog. Sealfon Eng's new medium makes updating easy and adds a level of accountability to the project. "If I say I'm going to do it everyday, I have to," she says. "I'm motivated by shame." With this online format, it's simple to combine text with images, sound and even video. Past entries include video of subway performers and a photo of a green Schwinn bike that Sealfon Eng covets whenever she happens across it locked up on the street. She pairs each item with thoughts on why it made her happy, giving insight into her personality.

As a designer, Sealfon Eng says side projects help her stay inspired. "I'm really interested in projects that help me see the world in a new way," she says. "I think as a graphic designer it's all about how you see things." With this project, she's training herself to notice the small things around her and look for meaningful connections. She believes documenting strengthens her vision, offering an opportunity to take her creative thinking to the next level.

The blog also gives readers a new perspective. "It's a calendar but time is marked in a different way," she says. "I think people are always fascinated by the passage of time expressed in unconventional methods." Sealfon Eng hopes to keep up her entries as long as she can and eventually would like to present the project in a print format.

Keep Watching
Don't miss these other noteworthy efforts:

Stranger a Day
http://roarkjohnson.blogs.com/photos/stranger_a_day
As his project title suggests, photographer Roark Johnson spent a year photographing a stranger each day.

Alarm Clock Portraits
http://archive.cbcradio3.com/issues/2004_04_30/index.cfm?page=05
Artist Dean Baldwin documents his daily life with an unlikely set-up—a picture snaps every morning when he hits the snooze button. Click on "Relaunch CBC Radio 3" then snooze button to experience this morning ritual.

The Photoblog Resource
www.photoblogs.org
This portal makes it easy to wade through the Web's countless photoblogs. Check out the most popular sites or search by theme.