Resolution

Guess what; I wrote this last year. I'm hoping to still be in the nice dreamland considering all the options and experiences to be revealed to me in 2009.

Too often we start the year with grand plans, picture a day on flickr, give up the day job and become a professional photographer, take better photos, loose the excess weight gained over Christmas, post more often on the blog etc. Perhaps the only rule of resolutions is that you need to make some so that there is something to have broken by the time February comes round, but that would be the pessimist talking, more on that later.

1. My first 2009 resolution is to take a lot more people shots and develop my skills in engaging with models as a result.

Switches on the Austin Powers voice: Yeah, baby, yeah

Thank you for the tip Mr. Strobist

When I've looked back at previous five or six years photos there's been lots of animals landscapes and sport shots, but I've severely under shot the human race. There was a great peice on mega photographer Chase Jarvis' site earlier in the month of December where he talked about what it takes. The reference to 10,000 hours of trying made some sense to me. In the past - dim and distant - I shot film, a lot of film. As a self funded amateur photographer with a day job, I routinely shot 150 rolls of film for a couple of years straight. I shot mainly motor racing and some glamour stuff in a studio. I shot a lot of pictures, and looking back I realise now that experience really honed my skills. I could pan with cars at all speeds with all kinds of lenses almost as if it was second nature. I could do the old glamour two light setup really easy but never went too far beyond it except by accident. I was a lot younger and single: cars and girls and photography floated my boat so I put in the hours.
Fast forward a bunch of years and now I can still pick up a camera and pan with all kinds of stuff, but I've looked for more use of the skill. I found that I could pan with horse drawn carriages in Florence Italy in the rain. The technique is still there.
Glamour models; not done much in the recent years and I'm now more looking to people pictures that have more appeal than the same stock poses of the same girls week in week out.

Call for models... photographer needs you to collaborate on photo projects - leave me some messages in the comments if you're interested. I get chance to practise and improve my photography and some great pictures to demonstrate what I can do, you get the pictures from the shoot to do what you like with.

2. The next resolution for 2009 will be the megapixel driven one, I think that this could be the year my ReadyNAS needs some bigger hard disks, as the current crop of cameras sure fill up memory cards and the ReadyNAS at a heck of a rate. I also need to get out of the iVIEW/Expression Media hole. No progress on this software lately that convinces me to keep on putting in time with it. But what else would work for me? Aperture, Lightroom, PhotoStation, Extensis Portfolio? It's a big task there's around 20K images in my library, but solving it will make picture finding simpler again.

3. With some more chance to think I've decided the final resolution for 2009 should be a little less technical and more related to approach. So for 2009 I'm going to really try the positive side. By this I mean look for the chance or opportunity first, not the barriers or the reasons not to do something. Mentally I need to embed the following question in my brain;

What can this project, or opportunity, help me to acheive?

Happy 2009 and let's see how much progress I've made on these three resolutions in February.


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