Jan. 10--Think of things you do every day.
Brush your teeth. Drink a cup of coffee. Check your email.
Kris DaPra, an amateur photographer and nature lover, added something else.
She vowed to take photographs in a Cook County forest preserve every day in 2014.
And she pretty much did it. There were only eight days when she didn't go out into the preserves, having been unable to completely curtail visiting family out of town.
She deputized her husband to take pictures for her, but "I still feel bad about missing those eight days," she said.
The idea for the project occurred in December 2013. DaPra was looking for a way to force herself to learn more about her camera and about using light and composition.
"And I knew I also wanted to get out of the house because I had a feeling it was going to be a bad winter," she said.
So she set herself the daily forest preserve photo challenge.
January 1 dawned frigid and snowy. DaPra, who has hiked and camped extensively in the cold, was undeterred.
She headed to the Ned Brown Preserve near her Elk Grove Village home and emerged with a striking black-and-white shot of snowy woods.
That was Day 1.
There were 364 to go.
Day after day DaPra, who works part-time as a substitute teacher, headed out with her camera.
Snow was no deterrent; she traveled by snow shoe or on skis, and considered those days among her favorite.
"It was like being in the wilderness, because no one else could really access the groves," she said.
When she walked across Busse Lake one day, alone on the frozen lake, "I just felt I was up in Canada somewhere."
And it was in winter that she shot her favorite picture of the year.
On Day 34, she came upon a lagoon formed by Salt Creek in a spellbinding winter state.
"The trees, the shrubbery, everything was frozen," she said. "You had the sun coming up and mist off the river that still wasn't frozen -- it was just magical. I've never seen it like that before or since."
The seasons changed, in the preserves and in DaPra's pictures, which you can see at https://www.flickr.com/photos/fpd365/.
Spring wildflowers give way to summer's butterflies and dragonflies, which in turn yield to late summer's goldenrod and then the fiery trees of fall.
She loved it all, even the days that were so cold that she just slipped her fingers out of mittens for a few moments to shoot a picture.
"The only days that were hard were (those with) mosquitoes," she said. "Some days I ran in, took a picture and ran out again."
The project caught the attention of communications staffers at the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. DaPra, who had created a Twitter account "to keep myself honest," was posting her pictures on Twitter and Flickr.
"We started seeing Kris' posts pop up under FPD 365 and we loved the images right from the beginning," said district spokesman Don Parker. "They were just stunning images."
When staffers got in touch with DaPra to ask permission to share the photos, they learned that she was, in a way, family.
Her husband, John McCabe, is the district's director of resource management. DaPra, who has a degree in forest ecology, worked for the district herself in the 1990s, in habitat restoration, and is still a restoration volunteer and butterfly monitor.
She is delighted that the district has been using her photos in email newsletters and publications. But that wasn't the project's purpose.
"It was just for me," she said.
She has benefited greatly, she said. She has improved as a photographer; she has improved in her ability to identify birds.
She has gotten to watch the natural world closely and deeply.
"By doing this every day, you saw the changes every day," she said. "Sometimes you just drive by and miss it."
And she has reveled in the experience.
"A lot of my days I just spent sitting somewhere and waiting," she said. "What a nice thing to do in summer, to sit in the woods."
And what a nice thing to do now, to scroll through FPD 365 looking at ice-covered streams, knobby-kneed sandhill cranes and full moonrises through the trees.
It's a treat, but also a reminder.
What looks like a nature vacation is all around us. DaPra shot most of her pictures in Busse Woods, as the Ned Brown Preserve is popularly known, a few miles from her home.
We can see these wonders ourselves, if we only go out and look.
If you want to look and photograph, you can start by attending the forest preserves' monthly photo meet-ups. The next one is Jan. 24 at the Crabtree Nature Center (information is at http://fpdcc.com/photo-meet-ups).
Or you can simply look and enjoy, preferably on a regular basis.
Maybe not as often as you brush your teeth. Maybe, instead, as often as you gas up your car.
FPD 365 was DaPra's project, but the rest of us can consider it our invitation.
blbrotman@tribpub.com
