For some reason, I've spent a fair amount of time looking to the future when it comes to photography. It surprises me given how busy I've been with lots of other things (work, running, writing, and so on). Still, I have a few things I want to work toward and accomplish at some point. Will any of them get done in 2023? Hopefully. That said, I think it will take a few years to work on these. Let's take a look at them.

1. Set up a tabletop studio.
2. Play with more lighting tools and setups.
3. Plan and complete a local photo project.
4. Work on portrait photography (especially for men).

I think four future goals is a reasonable number to work with, at least for starters. Otherwise I'd pull what little hair I have. Now why these goals? Well, I suppose I can spell that out a bit.

The tabletop studio bit has been in my mental to-do list for several years now. I've even put studio boxes on my Adorama wish list in the past. What had been missing for some time was a place to put said box, but I finally got around to clearing a devoted spot on my bedroom console table. That spot is being held by a very old camera of mine while I continue working on the rest of the bedroom and procuring the needed equipment. I hope that once I get my tabletop studio set up I'll be able to spend more time photographing object macros and things like that. I may even try something like liquid macro photography .

While I've used a hot shoe flash in numerous contexts over the years, I find that it being a flash may not always be the best thing. So I want to try different on-camera lights. While I know that a number of YouTubers swear by ring lights, I'm more intrigued by LumeCubes. The flexibility of the Pro model, in particular, has captured my interest. I feel like its customizable nature can help me with my persistent white balance struggles. My ability to use the right white balance has gotten better, but it's still not necessarily my strong suit. And I still forget to change it from time to time, which results in some outdoor photo foibles. Whoops.

Many years ago I actually embarked on a project to photograph all the art at the Blue Line stations. I did it, but I rushed myself because I tried to do it all in one day. As a result, I was exhausted by the time I got to the Mall of America station. I'm not ever sure where those photos are, to be honest. This time around, I have an idea but know there's no way I can get all the shots in a day or even a week. I know roughly in what season I want to shoot (spring), so I will need to work on planning this project over the first two-three months of 2023. Most of the planning will be logistics (especially location scouting), as I suspect the shooting part will be fairly easy. Then again I could be subjected to my chosen subject being in full shade. We'll see how all that goes.

This last one is likely to be a big fat surprise to anyone that's followed my photography over the years. It's a surprise to me, too! For years I avoided dabbling in photos of people, but this has begun to shift as I've tried to get my work shown at the Minnesota State Fair. I think photographing the Olympics was the thing that set this in motion, as I had one of my greatest strokes of genius/luck there. It's this photo right here. Since then, my stance on photographing people has loosened bit by bit. I have noticed, though, that I tend to be a bit more confident when photographing men. I also feel like men do not get as much devoted to them both in terms of content and technique. I saw an ad for pose cheat sheets, and the number of possible poses for women was nearly double that for men. I think that's a bunch of rubbish and would like to push the envelop a bit. I'm not sure what all this will look like, but I hope to start doing a little bit of foundational research on this in the next year or two.

My photo goals are few and definitely involved. Since I'm not setting hard and fast milestones for these goals, there is a good chance I won't achieve all of them in the coming year. (There is a reason I'm not planning this out too much. If you really want to know, drop a comment so I can explain it there.) Still, I have plans, at least, and they can jump start me when I'm feeling a bit depleted on the photography front.