So last month I did a photoshoot where I shaved off my beard and was clean-shaven for the first time in years. I thought about staying clean-shaven for a while, but Erica intimated that she'd rather I grew my beard back and so I started not-shaving right away. I've always said I can grow a beard fairly quickly, but I wasn't exactly sure how long it would take--so for a week I kept thinking I should document the growth. The compulsion was too strong and after a week I shaved down again, set up a little home studio and started taking a photo a day. About half of these Erica took and the rest are self-portraits with the timer (all the blurry ones are surely in the latter group).

I was going to go all wild and completely natural, but after just a week the neck beard was too itchy and so I started my normal beard-grooming. This is also the point at you can safely say that that's a beard and not just heavy scruff, so my future claim will be that I can grow a beard in a week. The whole project ended when I decided that I needed a haircut this weekend and the barber offered to trim my beard as well. It had been at the back of my head to maybe go for a nice, thick Grizzly Adams, but "yes, please" was out of my mouth and that was that.

And you know, thank goodness that I have a wife whose reaction to "hey, I put a masking tape box on the wall and some tape on the floor to mark my feet positions and where the tripod goes" is "Okey doke". That, and "we should stick the cats up there".

Other lessons from the month: I guess I really like plaid shirts and striped sweaters. And I forgot to mark off the vertical angle of the camera, so the whole thing sort of drifts downward (which I corrected for the video above).

Oh, and that cathcy tune in the video was composed by Phil Schuldt of Blackout Dates and SDS Trio for a different FuzzyCo web project that's coming Real Soon Now.

P.S. I was halfway through this project and the iPhone app Everyday was released which simplifies a lot of the process of taking photos like this and making little movies like the one above. Even if you're not interested in doing such a thing, check out the great intro video on their site.