Good Resolution

So, you’ve made all your New Year’s resolutions?

You’re going to lose weight? Get organised? Learn a new language? Save more money? Cut back on the beer?

Good luck!

A recent study showed that only 12% of people who made New Year’s resolutions actually kept them.

Here's a way to get up amongst that 12%. Make a photographic resolution. That should be easier to keep. Here are some ideas:

• Try out a new technique. You could have a go at pinhole photography for example – World Pinhole Day is coming up on April 26th. Or you could try your hand at macro photography, painting with light, or silhouettes. Stretch your horizons.
  
  
• Set yourself an assignment - capture the atmosphere of your town or village, make a photographic record of the insects in your garden, or build a portfolio of emotions.
  
  
• Enter competitions. Not all require entry fees, and you might win enough to buy that new lens you’ve been coveting. Photocompete gives up-to-date details of many competitions. But, do be careful to read the rules. Don’t enter any competitions that take all rights to entries.
  
  
• Find a new perspective. Photograph familiar objects from down low, or up high. Photograph reflections on water, without the original objects, and then turn them upside down for unusual abstracts.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Photograph local sporting events, the more off-beat the better.
  
  
• Learn more about the history of photography. Find out where we’re coming from, and marvel at images taken on film, often with heavy, unwieldy equipment. My daughter gave me the autobiography of one of my photographic heros - Ansel Adams - for Christmas, and I’m looking forward to reading it. How about Julia Margaret Cameron? Dorothea Lange? Frank Hurley? Eric Hosking? Weegee? Know who they were?
  
  
• Make a photo-sequence – for example, the same tree in the same field every month of the year – and stitch them together into one big image. Or try panoramic photography. It’s not as difficult as you think.
  
  
• Abandon colour and try photographing in monochrome. You can get some wonderfully moody effects.
  
  
• Buy my book (shameless plug), use it, and if you like it, recommend it to others. Review it on Amazon, even.
  
  
• Carry a camera with you wherever you go. You never know when that extraordinary photographic opportunity might arise.

Snappy New Year!

(Hmmmm. Maybe I shouldn't say that. The last thing I want you to do is take 'snaps')