Photography Goals for 2010

A blog post over at Digital Photography School led me to start thinking a bit about what I'd like to accomplish this year with my trusty Nikon D50.  I picked the camera up several years ago and I love almost everything about it.  I find that because it's not the smallest camera, I'm not as inclined to take it everywhere with me.  I also worry about tempature changes during the winter months.  I do however want to do more with it this year than I have in any of the past years and I do enjoy myself when trying to get that "perfect" shot.

So - in the blog, the author lists 30 photographic goals that one could use as ideas for your goals for 2010.

Although I like all the ideas in the list - I'll offer up 10 photographic goals that I'm going to make for myself this year based on my favorites from the list.

1. Shoot a Photo a Day - I don't know that I could do this for an extended period of time, but I will do this through February to see what comes of it.  I'm more of a photo shoot kind of person, but this will be fun as it will challenge me to find at least one subject each day through the shortest month of the year.  :)
2. Prioritize your Goals - I like this idea.  I think it would be good for me to sit down and give some thought to finding out what I enjoy most about photography and then making a plan to devote more time to it.  I'd also like to save for a new Nikkor Lens this year.
3. Read a book per month - Again, I think this is a great goal to strive towards.  With so many areas to focus in on (no pun intended) it should be easy to achieve this goal. I'll post each month's book reviews up on this site.
4. Join or Start a Photo Club - I'll look around the Washtenaw area and see what I can find.  This will be a great way to get some advice and learn from others!
5. Share Online - this is something that I haven't been great at... I'm probably way to critical and I just need to share my pictures with others.  As you may have seen in a previous post, I've been working with Adobe Lightroom 3 and I really like it.  The ability to publish to Flickr makes it easy to accomplish this goal.
6. Create a Photo Book per Month - Well, a photo book per month may be a bit much, I will follow through with this one and set a goal to create at least two photo books this year.  If it goes well and I enjoy the final work, maybe I'll make more.
7. Get Published - This is by far the loftiest goal on the list.  First - it assumes that my work will be worthy of being published.  It's a good thing I still have eleven months to figure out how to accomplish this goal.
8. Develop a Post Processing Workflow - this will be key if I want to be able to capture the best pictures from a photo shoot and share them with minimal amount of effort.  I will spend time this month and next developing the way that works best for me.
9. Make Personal Post Cards - This will be the goal that I'll tackle in the month of January.  I received several Christmas Cards in 2009 from friends and family members and I didn't make the time to send cards back.  I want to give a personal thank you to each person and I think this may be a great way to show that I really appreciated the effort of my loved ones.
10. Take a Workshop - Yes, there is so much to learn!  I plan on taking a workshop, perhaps locally or maybe a photo trip to another state.

There you go... that's my list for 2010.  It will be challenging, but I think it will be great fun as well.

I'll post monthly summary entries to let you know how I'm progressing toward the goals.

Happy Shooting!