New Year (Photography) resolutions

Catching up on some emails over the weekend I swung by Photojojo, which is an excellent photography newsletter and I spotted their photography New Year's resolutions, some of which I had already resolved to do. If you are into photography they are well worth a look at.


Taken in Dun Laoghaire in October

Things like archiving better, something I need to get more organised with. My plan is to open up two files each month starting with January, one for work and a personal one. Currently any work I do is stored in a named folder before eventually being stored on a spare hard drive. I am also toying with some kind of hard copy of what is where, an easy reference guide if that’s possible. Or maybe that’s where tagging and the like comes in, but they are generally tied to a photo programme. The problem with a folder that is just dated for me is that it would not be unusual to have two work events on one day not to mention the odd pic of my own taken along the way, so how do I catalogue an image of say a moment on a bus so that I remember where it is when I look for easy retrieval in the future.

My plan is that each month I will have two files of all the images I have taken that month, with duplicates and non-usable shots deleted, or that’s the idea anyway. So far I have opened up the January 2009 file but haven’t yet deleted the pics I don’t want. I still find that hard to do, but I must be ruthless and mindful of space.

I also want to print more and often. A flickr pal, Mymsie, was staying with us over the summer during her Irish holiday from LA and she gave out yards that I haven’t any pictures up on my house walls yet. The habitat frames I bought last year sit waiting by the side of the telly for someone with a decent drill to put them and shelves up. I did try myself and ended up putting a useless hole in the wall. It is ridiculous that I have none up yet. I find it hard to believe that we are living there a year, never mind the fact that once we moved in the work I planned to finish around the place never happened. Hey I’m a busy woman. But that is a priority for me over the coming weeks.

For a long time I have toyed with the idea of doing a project 365, a pic a day for a year and what better way to start than on New Year’s Day which I did. I don’t plan to feel any pressure doing this, if I don’t manage it I don’t manage it, but I aim to give it a good go. Whether or not an image deserves a photo of the day mantle is another matter, I thought I was going to be stuck yesterday and started taking pics of a cabbage cut in half, luckily I was saved by some beautiful evening light. In addition if I don’t capture anything for a couple of days I am not going to freak out either and throw my hands up in the air, I’ll just either do a sneaky catch-up or ignore the missing days. Either way my main plan is to have fun with this not make it a chore.

In 2009 I also plan to try and make more money from photography, camera upgrade not withstanding, how I plan to do that is another matter, we’ll see how it goes. A few other photography projects are also in the pipelines, but more on them in the future if and when they materialise. One other personal project for the year is to work on an 18th birthday book for the Young Wan for her coming of age next January.

I don’t want it to be a rush job, done at the end of November in a panic, I want to take my time, source all my pics (many of my film images of her over the years have been given to relatives before I got copies so I need to do a massive hoke into what I actually have and digitise them) and put them together in a blurb book, I have started but still have a long way (months) to go before I am completely happy with it.

So that’s about it with my photography New Year resolutions, have you made any?