Projects are what took my photography from being just 'nice' to something more personal and meaningful. I make no secret about how Chuck Inglefield (a fellow member of Lost in Focus whose personal blog is here) got me started down this track. The difference is fairly subtle from just every day shooting – a project is a more an idea, a concept or theme that binds together images. Although that idea can be a simple one, the difference can be dramatic.

Urban Melancholy, Chuck's social narrative photo project which he started on Pbase back in 2005 was the first time I ran into this idea. After a few discussions on email, we quickly became friends and I found myself craving to find something I could be similarly immersed in.

My first project was "negative space" – for a month I mounted a 60mm prime lens to my DSLR and only shot images that fit that theme. I went from having average composition skills to being able to capture images I never would have even noticed. After that I started on more ambitious ideas. One of my projects yielded just 16 images I shared online, although it was the result of weeks of shooting, a dozen models and thousands of images.

Since I got to the US, I've been shooting the kind of photography that I love, but it's been been a long time since I started a personal project. A recent thread on facebook gave me an idea and this weekend I shot the first two images for it.

This project doesn't have a name yet. Maybe I'll just call it "25 things". This is #1 in a series.

When I was a child, all I wanted to be was happy.

As I got older, I learned about pride and by the time I was a teenager, I found myself saying “I’d rather be proud than happy”.

It was a long time before that changed. Now I realise that I’ll take happiness any day.

I guess I was right all along.