New Year's Eve Photo Ideas, Hour by Hour
Almost every New Year's photo is taken in a four-minute window either side of midnight, which is exactly the window where phones are least usable: dark, loud, and everyone moving. The rest of the night - twelve hours of it - goes unrecorded.
These prompts start in the afternoon and run into the first hours of January. The midnight frame is in there, but it is one of twelve rather than the only thing you come away with.
How to run it
- Length
- 12 hours · 12 photos
- Start it
- Mid-afternoon on the 31st, while it is still light.
The shot list
- 1
Daylight, on the 31st
Anything outdoors while the sun is still up. It will look impossibly early later.
- 2
The shopping
What was bought for tonight, on the counter.
- 3
Getting ready
The mirror, the iron, the third outfit change.
- 4
Leaving the house
Coats on, door open, cold air.
- 5
First arrival
Whoever's house or bar it is, from the doorway.
- 6
The table at 9 p.m.
Full, untouched, nobody drunk yet.
- 7
The group, early
One frame while everyone still looks assembled.
- 8
Whoever is on the phone
Someone always is. Wishing someone else a happy new year from a hallway.
- 9
Ten minutes to
The room turning toward a screen or a window.
- 10
Midnight
One frame. Do not film it - shoot once and put the phone away.
- 11
The first hour of the year
Whatever the room became after midnight.
- 12
Home, on the 1st
Shoes off, coat on the floor, lights low.
Three things worth knowing
- Set the Sway up on the 30th. Nobody installs an app at 11:50 p.m.
- Hour ten is one frame, not a video. The video you take of a countdown is never watched again.
- Slots are read in the Sway's own timezone, so friends abroad will fill the same hour at a different local midnight - which is the interesting part.
Run this list with Sway
Start a Sway for these hours, send the people you are with its link and follow the list hour by hour. Everyone gets one shot per hour, and when it ends the hours come back as a single split-screen video.