I recently finished processing the last of the photos for the 2016 version of my ongoing “dailies” project.

Earlier this year I messed around with the idea of simulating multiple exposures by averaging JPEG files in the pixel domain. I know you can do this in photo processing programs, but what if you wanted to make like, a 40 or 50 image exposure? It’s definitely not impossible but I’m lazy so I wrote some Python to do the work for me. I compiled the result for each month in a gallery.

Here’s an average day in December 2016:

average of all daily photos published december 2016

The sum of the exposure times for all “daily” photos in December is 2.37362459597 seconds. 2,678,401 seconds passed in December 2016. The images I chose to represent my December comprise 8.9 x 10^-5 percent of all the time in the month.

It’s hard for me to process how time seems to compress once it’s passed. On top of that I can’t believe how hard it can be to make sense of what we do remember. I know it’s unrealistic to expect our brains to remember every single moment. Still, I can’t fathom just how much is forgotten.

Even so, when I go through all my dailies for 2016 I’m reminded of a year’s worth of wonderful memories. Photos as a memory aid, even if they’re maybe a millionth of the time that passed, have been a welcome source of joy.