For me New Year’s resolutions aren’t so much resolutions for the next year, made on January 1st, but things I’ve been thinking about for some time. These could be more accurately called photography goals for 2012.
Here are some of my goals as well as my thoughts for each for this year. There are not very many goals; too many just doesn’t seem to work for me.
Plan a trip or photographer’s vacation this year. I want my time to be about photography, not one of those trips where I bring along a camera and hope for a snap shot or two, but a real photographer’s excursion that makes me use the equipment, knowledge, and talent I have.
I want to make the effort to learn new techniques by taking a class, or at least buying some books or CDs written by accomplished photographic writers. Educating oneself is always fun.
I will continue my ongoing quest to organize my old prints and slides. I want to place as many as possible on archival CDs. There are many ways to copy photographs and slides. For prints I use my camera, a tripod, and a level, to make a digital photograph. For slides a scanner works best. My scanner, although capable of producing high-resolution scans only produces one film image at a time and is slow. There are scanners that will do multiple slides and several formats at a time and the price for them is under $1,000. Maybe this is my year for a new purchase.
Like many long time photographers, I have old film camera equipment whose time of service has long past. The pictures they produced were great, but modern camera technology has progressed far beyond those old film cameras, and individuals like me, who have embraced the high quality digital world, will never return to film. Fortunately, there are high school classes that are still using chemical darkrooms and black and white film that has students looking for inexpensive old manual cameras and that is a much better place than gathering dust in my basement.
I am planning to do a systematic photographic inventory of our household goods. I have to admit I am as lax as anyone when it came to a photographic home inventory. Then I was faced a couple of summers ago with a forest fire approaching my door and needed to do it in a hurry. I have that quick and haphazard photo-inventory, but now it’s time to do it right. It’s not very hard if one does it one room at a time, and I think worth the effort.
For me, my store is a great place to interact with others interested in photography, and I have a few chairs available, and it is fun to just talk about photography.
My advice for those that don’t have my convenience, is make the time to get together with other photographers with no other goal then to talk about or do photography, and if you already have been occasionally participating in a club how about searching out photographers specifically interested in the kind of subjects you like to photograph, for example, collaborate with like minded enthusiasts in a macro, scenic or birding group and start planning an outing or just get together for refreshments and talk at some local spot.
7. I could add a lens and make it one of my goals for this year, but because of my shop camera equipment just happens; and because I prefer to purchase used equipment, I am always on the look out for bargains that fit the kind of photography I do. So my goal this year is to sell something that I am not using and buy something (at a good price) that I will use.
I am sure readers can easily make their own photography resolutions (or goals) for the year we have just begun. What could they be? I can only imagine.
That’s it for this week and I wish you and yours the best in the New Year.
Contact me at HYPERLINK “http://www.enmanscamera.com/” www.enmanscamera.com or HYPERLINK “mailto:emcam@telus.net” emcam@telus.net. Stop by Enman’s Camera at 423 Tranquille Road in Kamloops if you want an experienced photographer please call me at 250-371-3069. I also sell an interesting selection of used photographic equipment.