Hey Everyone! Hope you're having a great Holiday season. It's the end of the year and there are certain things I think that every Photographer should do to end this year and begin the next year on the right foot. Now I'm a very organized person and this stuff might not apply to you as it does to me. Planning the next years activities and trips is crucial to having a successful year. And reviewing the previous year can help in figuring what went wrong and what went right with projects or trips.  

Reviewing things that went right in your last year project and trips. Did they go as planned? Were the plans you made good did they have enough detail or too much? Was there enough time to complete? Was it fun? Because most of all Photography and the things we do with it should be fun! Thats why we do it. Take a good honest look at how your year went. Did you get good winners? Last year I had a couple of good winners but not as many as years past. Why? Maybe it was the subjects I was shooting. Maybe I wasn't as inspired. Maybe I just wasn't holding my tongue right. There could be many reasons but be honest and figure it out so you do better next year. Start planning for next year by setting up projects and trips. I hope to have my Van finished by spring and taking it out on trips with my wife and Forrest the wonder dog is a definite thing I will do. Taking some small maybe week or so trips and then maybe a larger one out west that would be cool!  I want to finish my Small Towns project that I started this year but for some reason or another didn't finish. So that can be a weekly small trips. I'm looking at doing maybe a small bike packing trip also that will produce some photography or at least a good video. I think bike riding and video kind of go hand in hand. Then there is the photography Club stuff that I will be doing. As one of the officers of the club I tend to get volunteered to do some sort of presentation or two during the year. Then there is this blog that keeps me thinking and writing about photography.  Last but not least there is my Film Photography that I am still working on. I had this on last year's list and still didn't do anything.  This year I want to concentrate on medium format photography with my Bronica ETR SI 645 film camera that I have. So I have lots to do and plan for this year.

Some other maintenance things that I think photographers should do. First I think that you should check the Firmware updates on all of the camera equipment that you have. From Camera Bodies to Lenses and even some flash heads you can check and maybe upgrade the firmware.  Another maintenance item to do is to change the copyright year on the metadata on your camera if your are doing it in camera or in software like Lightroom. This is easy to do but also easy to forget. So at the first of the year make sure you change the year. What about updating your inventory of your camera equipment? Keeping this up to date and sent to your insurance company can be critical if you break something but it's not on the list of items you insured. So it's a great time to do an inventory not only for insurance reasons but maybe you have some stuff that you don't need anymore and can sell or maybe you have some stuff to upgrade. The biggest item I need to upgrade is my Laptop. Although I use a MacMini desktop computer for most of my editing stuff my laptop is almost obsolete because of age and not being able to keep up with newer operating systems and software. I have been using an iPad for mobile editing and it works good but I may need a newer laptop to run Photography meetings and it would be much easer on trips than my iPad. So that's one thing I'm thinking about upgrading this year. I'm down to a couple of models of MacBooks but haven't decided yet but I'm sure it won't be long before I'm writing a blog about my new MacBook.

Well I have rambled on enough. The point of all of this is to plan your year and get ready so all you have to do is start shooting. The less you have to figure out the more energy you can put towards your photography. So until next week Get out and Shoot!

Hey if you want to check out some more of my photography go to my instagram account Max Stansell Photography there are over 2000 post there. Here is the link

 Max Stansell Photography Instagram Link