One Second Everyday – The Modern Photo Book

A few years ago I stumbled upon a TED talk given by Cesar Kuriyama called One Second Everyday where he discussed the importance that a one second glimpse into someone’s life can be. You can see that talk here. His argument being that practically all of us in this day in age had video recorders in our pockets and that video can bring back so many more emotions that looking at an old photograph can. At the time he has just released an app to accompany his project and I was very intrigued so I downloaded it. 

At first, I wasn’t sure what the hell I should record.

I had just moved to England a year beforehand so I figured it would be a great way to capture the moments of my new expat adventure. I was being terrible about keeping up with a blog and I didn’t want to over share on my Instagram or Facebook. I would forget a lot even when the app would send me a notification to remind me. However I stuck it out, and before I knew it a year had passed and I couldn’t wait to see them all together. Except the app crashed and would not put all my seconds together and I spent a few days editing them all together. I was devastated but in true Paula fashion I had worked so hard on it, I had to see it through. You can see my first video below. I should have taken it as a sign and given up. 

I didn’t give up though.

How could I? It started to become second nature and the app eventually worked out its kinks. I have had no problems editing and putting it together since that first year. Some days I would force myself to do something new just so I could capture a second of it. Other days, especially when the weather was shit, my highlight of the day was watching a tv show. I still took a shit load of pictures but I found that replaying a few days or the year so far on my one seconds gave me far more smiles than my pictures did. I couldn’t remember the last time I printed out any photos and made an album. These days I only made photo books for gifts but even so they were ordered online and wasn’t a book with a physical photo placed under sticky clear film. 

When I became pregnant in January 2014, I knew I wanted to keep going and document my pregnancy…and then of course I wanted to continue after Oscar was born so I could capture his sounds and coos…and then of course I needed to document his first year…and then well here we are and we are still going. What is funny though when I started recording my one seconds after Oscar was born was that it felt ridiculous taking video of anything other than Oscar, and 15 months later, its pretty much what I am still taking video of. Cliché probably yes, but yeah the kid is what I am most interested in seeing every day. 

I don’t know how long I am going to continue doing it but I am coming up to 3 years now of documenting our life this way and I’m not intending to stop just yet. 

Is it bad to document your life this way?

Should we continue to keep with those traditions and print out photos? Or is this the wave of the future we have to keep moving on with? 

Do you want to give it a try? The first time I shared it on our forum a few years ago we had many Punky Moms give it a go. I figured with the new year here, maybe you want to make a commitment to documenting your life this way? Download the 1 Second Everyday app here. This is my personal endorsement and I am in no way getting compensated by telling you about this app.