If you fancy yourself an old pro at selfies, meet Nancy Floyd, the Bend photographer who’s made self-portraits practically a lifelong project. In 1982, with a spare camera at her disposal, Floyd set out on a life-defining project to photograph herself daily. While the plans morphed over time, the results — make that some of the results — of her decades of work is the new book “Weathering Time.”

Floyd has lived in Bend for three years. She and her husband moved to Central Oregon after Floyd’s retirement from Georgia State University, where she taught photography. Getting back out West had been a goal for the couple, who once lived in Southern California while Floyd attended graduate school there.

“We really liked it there, and we only moved to Georgia because I got a job teaching in Atlanta,” she said. “And I love Atlanta. It’s a beautiful place to live, but we both wanted to be back out West once we retired, and so that’s what we did.”

Long before retiring, she undertook what was supposed to be a 20-year project of daily photos.

“I had graduated with my BFA from (University of Texas) Austin, and I was waiting tables. I made enough money to buy my first dream camera,” she said last week.

But she also had her starter camera, a Pentax SP1000, “which was basically the low-end 35 millimeter camera for students,” Floyd said. “All of a sudden I had two cameras. I’d never had two cameras. … At that time, it was sort of like, ‘Well, I don’t want to waste this second camera.’

“And I was talking to a friend one day, and I just sort of flippantly said, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting if I photographed myself every day for 20 years and watched myself grow older?’”

And then she did, positioning the camera on a tripod in a corner of her bedroom. Every morning before she headed to work, she would take the picture. This was a film camera, of course, with each role of film (kids, ask an adult to explain film cameras to you) containing a month’s worth of the morning photos.

“So the idea was it was a calendar, and once a year, I would have 12 months and 12 roles of film,” she said. “The camera was set up in the corner of the room, and it was very easy to take a picture. I didn’t process the film but once every two to three years. … The easier it is for me to make the photographs, the more photographs I make.”

Eventually, the photos expanded beyond the bedroom, and included family members and friends, inadvertently creating more of a family photo or even journalistic feel.

Still, by the ’90s she wasn’t necessarily taking pictures every day. There was even a three-year stretch that decade when she abandoned the effort of photographing herself daily altogether.

“I’d get tired of it and I would sort of stop and start it in the ’90s,” she said. “It was ’96, the last year that I wasn’t doing it. And I thought to myself that 2002 was coming up, and it was kind of silly for me to stop something that I’d already been doing for quite a long time.”

Once she resumed, Floyd kept taking photos well beyond the 20-year deadline. An exhibition of her photography at the time her self-portrait project should have been wrapping up reignited it, she said. Many of Floyd’s artistic projects tend to be personal, and the exhibit comprised photos she’d taken over the years at her childhood home in League City, Texas.

“We were renting it, and when we moved out, it just sat there unoccupied for years and years,” she said. “So I started going back to the house and photographing it every year as it decayed. The installation I was doing was really about the house, but at the same time, I thought, well, I should scan all these negatives I have and make a movie of just my body, and that would be just a small piece of that show.”

She had plenty of photos to choose among. Upon seeing them, she appreciated anew what she’d amassed after two decades.

“I realized, ‘Wow, there’s a lot going on here that I had not even thought about when I started the project, and so it just seemed silly to stop at that point,” Floyd said. “I don’t do it every day anymore, and I haven’t done it every day for many, many years. Some months I miss, but I don’t miss years anymore.”

Around 2009, as Floyd drew nearer to the three-decade mark of taking self-portraits, she began to re-create some of what she considered the more iconic photos.

“There are some photos that I’ve taken that I just love the way I look, or I love what I’m wearing, or I love the background. They’re sort of what I call my signature pieces, the ones that draw me in,” she said. “When I realized I was coming up on 30 years. I thought, ‘Hmm, I’m older.’ The first 20 years I was doing it, my body didn’t change that much. I was still young. You know, from 25 to 45 you look a little different, but it’s not extreme. Since the mid-2000s, I’m really starting to see my changes.”

One recent re-creation was of a photo Floyd took of herself and her mother in 1984.

“She was 63 years old, and I was 63 last year, so I decided that I would stand in the same posturing that she had done, and kind of make a picture of myself, so it’s called ‘Me and Mom at 63,’” she said, laughing. “It was really surprising, because I didn’t realize my body looked so much like my mother’s until I took that picture. So that was a nice thing to see — I felt a little more connected to my mom again, just knowing that I really do look a lot like her, physically.”

Floyd is the author of an earlier book, 2008’s “She’s Got a Gun,” in which she interviewed women about why they picked up a gun, and explored her own reasons and experiences.

She’d been trying to get a book of her self-portraits published for a while, but getting published is difficult, “and self-portraits of a woman’s body over time isn’t necessarily something that a lot of people are interested in,” she said.

Then she applied to, and won, the inaugural First Photo Book Award from London-based GOST Books and the International Center of Photography (New York).

She’s pleased with the layout of “Weathering Time,” which contains over 1,000 photographs selected from 2,500 she’d taken over 39 years. Rather than just run all the photos chronologically, there are categories such as “The Evolution of Pants,” which captures the fashion changes in pants. Another category depicts an array of T-shirts with words on them.

“Weathering Time” should be available this month, and Floyd is in discussions with area bookstores about carrying it. In the meantime, you can see more of her work and learn more about “Weathering Time” at nancyfloyd.com, as well as gostbooks.com, where you can order a copy of the book, expected to ship on Feb. 22.

One thing she hopes those who see her book take away from it is the desire to make more photographs of themselves, “in a less selfie way,” she said, “sort of the down time of moments, those moments when nothing is really happening, or when they get together with family, just standing together to make pictures.

“I know I’m biased, I’m a photographer, but I do think family photographs are really important. If you don’t have family, your friends. Having photographs of your friends that you can hold onto and cherish — there is something, the human connection between us and the intangible of life’s changes. … There’s this accumulation, this archive, that I hope that people appreciate as something to look at.”