Day 1/516 5

Taken on 12th January, 2009 in A plane over the Atlantic and at JFK International Airport, New York. Show on Flickr.

Today I left Ireland and flew to New York City.

Catherine will take the same flight in 5 weeks time, Day 38. We will spend at least another 5 weeks in New York before traveling to Corpus Christi, Texas and on Day 88 we will cross the border into Mexico.

That's where the road ahead begins to get hazy. We will continue traveling with an eye firmly on Buenos Aires as a potential finishing point, but with our minds open to the potential to spend time as it suits in any place we pass through. We will travel slowly and break regularly to work on projects ? some personal, some for clients in Ireland or Spain, some local work on farms or with various agencies. We will travel and explore, and at the same time work hard to maintain our personal and professional relationships in Europe.

Day516.com is a photoblog, a journal, and a scrapbook of sorts that serves to chronicle the journey we will take day by day. I am starting this project as a personal challenge, to help me reengage with photography, to immerse myself daily in the craft and through that to help me reflect on that craft, on the people and places we encounter, and our new rambling lifestyle.

I have chosen Day 516 as the day that will mark the end of this little project because I wanted to define a period long enough that our circumstances, in particular whereabouts, at the end are sufficiently unpredictable. These 516 days are a period during which this transition in our lives will have sufficient time and space to develop and reveal itself.

Whether this is a chronicle of a long-term emigration or not remains to be seen. Since the journey we are embarking on is so open-ended I wanted to place an end point at least on this system of documenting it. This closed system is then easier to frame, to examine, and to evaluate.

With that in mind then, as we set out on the next 515 days, I would like to define a few concrete goals.

On Day 1 I hope that on Day 516:

• I have posted an entry for each of the past 515 days and am preparing to wrap up this project.
• I still have a number of clients in Dublin who value our relationship and come to me regularly with new work opportunities.
• I can comfortably hold a conversation in Spanish and have made many friends and at least one client with whom I speak only Spanish.
• I have continued to submit work monthly to Film Night Knight, which has grown to become an engaging outlet for burgeoning filmmakers throughout Ireland.
• I have continued to develop my own personal projects in different media and have proudly completed at least 5 significant pieces of work over the past 515 days.
• I have comprehensively explored the potential of selling work through stock photography archives and have either discarded the idea or it forms a significant (30%+) part of my income.
• Catherine and I are happy about the amount of time we have spent in Latin America. We have learned and grown, individually and together, from our experience on the road.