You’ve set goals for 2022, now what?

Now that you’ve stated your goals, how do arrive at the accomplishment of them?

You don’t want your bright and shiny goals to get lost like all those past New Year’s resolutions (photograph every day, put together my portfolio, exercise more, don’t eat____, walk the dog every day, clean my office, garage, car, etc., be nice to____) These often start to fade by the middle of January!

Once you have goals, what’s the next step?

Strategic planning. Oxford defines “strategic” as: “Relating to the identification of long-term or overall aims and interests and the means of achieving them.” It is also defined as the “process of defining its strategy or direction and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy.” (Mintzberg & Quinn)

This applies to each of us as individual photographers, as well as any organization we have. What are your directions and your strategy to get to your goal, and what are your decisions about allocating your resources?

Knowledge is Power, what are your plans for your own study to increase your power in 2022?

Here’s a simple example from Annie Liebovitz’ book At Work:

“The first thing I did with my very first camera was climb Mt Fuji. Climbing Mt Fuji is a lesson in determination and moderation. It would be fair to ask if I took the moderation part to heart. But it certainly was a lesson in respecting your camera. If I was going to live with this thing, I was going to have to think about what that meant. There weren’t going to be any pictures without it.”

Boils it down to determination and getting to know her camera, and as she said later, taking it with her everywhere, shooting tons of pictures.

Ansel Adams came up with the strategy of moving photography from simply being a recording device, to using the whole process as a means to capture and show the world what he visualized. Remember that we largely have him, and his mentor Alfred Stieglitz, to thank for moving photography from being simply another tool for illustrations to being a fine art—something we tend to take for granted. He operated on a long-term strategy to accomplish that goal.

So now that you have your goals worked out, lets define your strategy, get out your notebook and do this (and yes leave them as comments too so we can learn from you.)

• What are your decisions and your directions to yourself? Yours could be as simple as “take at least one shot a day, even if it’s with my iPhone!”
• What are your resources? This includes your time, equipment, classes, models, etc. Just take a good look around. In a past episode of Advancing Your Photography you’ll hear Thomas Hawk [link its his first video)talk about how he steals moment during the day to get shot–waiting for a meeting to start, or walking to one—just grab those moments and fill them with your shots!
• Now get clever and work out your strategy to make use of these points to arrive at your goals.

You might ask what my goals and strategy are?

No matter what you put in your strategy it has to include seeing more of other’s work and expanding your knowledge. And getting out to capture your own images of life. I hope to help you along the way with these.

Good shooting in 2022!

Marc

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Featured Image of this article taken by Bob Holmes. Check out more of our blog posts here. Watch the live stream based on this blog here.