Plan to Improve your Photography in 2014

Almost every photographer I talk to wants to improve their photography. But when I ask them how they are doing that, they will have no plan or just vague thoughts about perhaps getting around to watching some online tutorial. Not a very efficient or practical way to improve.

Photographic Goals

The best way to improve is to plan your photography. Set photographic goals.

Since it’s the beginning of the year a lot of people make New Year’s Resolutions. I’m personally not a big fan of resolutions, but I do think this is a good time to review/set your photographic goals and create a road map for achieving those goals.

Start with the BIG GOALS. For example, here are some of my for 2014 BIG GOALS

Become a Better Photographer
Grow my Photography Audience
Create Epic Photos

As you can see these are big, nebulous goals and if I stopped here they are meaningless goals. I could probably make progress on each of these in a couple of weeks and claim I had met my goals for the year. What’s the point in that?

What’s Your Target

To make these big goals meaningful you need to add metrics. How much do I want to grow my photography audience? 1 person, 100 people, 200%? The actual number is less important than actually having a number to shoot for.

The famous quote by Peter Drucker applies here, “What Gets Measured Gets Managed”, by adding metrics to your goals you will be able to track your progress and know what the goal really means.

So add metrics to your goals to turn them into Targets.

Create a Roadmap

I recently talked to a photographer who said they wanted to take 12 great photos over the next year, photos they would be proud to hang on their wall. That’s a great goal! I then asked them how they planned to do that, and they didn’t have a clue. So then I asked how they had done last year and they said they had only taken 2 photos that were “wall-worthy”. After further discussion it turns out they had only been out shooting 5 times over the past year. It’s going to be very difficult to get 12 great photos in a year if you only go out to shoot 5 times in the year.

So now that you have to listed your BIG GOALS you need to think about how you are going to achieve those goals. Listing the steps necessary will become your roadmap to follow throughout the year to make sure you acheive your goal. In the above example of creating 12 great photos during the year you would first determine what steps would be necessary to create a great image. Going out and shooting is the obvious first step, so you should probably shoot a lot. So perhaps the step necessary would be something like “schedule 2 photo shoots a month”, or perhaps more. The point is to create a sub-goal that will help you realize the BIG GOAL of 12 great photos for the year.

Here is a breakdown of what I’m going to do to reach my BIG GOALS

Become a Better Photographer
- Attend one workshop or conference every quarter
- 30 mins of photography education every day (see this blog post)
- Schedule one photowalk every month
- Schedule one photography trip every quarter (Oregon Coast, Zion, Boston, Page)
Grow my Photography Audience
- Post 2 photos/week on social media sites
- Submit every new project to print publications until it is published
- Enter a photo contest very month
- Pursue and participate in a galley show every quarter
Create Epic Photos
- Schedule one large production shoot every quarter
- Complete 4 current photo projects
  - Shoot Multiscapes II in January
  - Shoot one conceptual photo each month
  - Schedule 3 shoots to complete Paper Doll project
  - Edit and compile Reflections photos
- Start 4 new projects

As you can see I have a detailed plan of how to accomplish each goal. In addition I have a spreadsheet where I schedule which month I’m going to do each of these sub-goals. This makes sure that I’m always making progress on my goals and don’t push off a goal to the future.

So what are your photography goals for 2014? Share them in the comments, I would love to hear them.

2 Comments

Comments are closed.