What happened to 2014? Its really zoomed past, which can mean only one thing . . . time to make those new years resolutions!

I’m not going to suggest that we all aim to eat healthy, lose weight, save money or improve on our green credentials – those are all good things, but I’m a photographer so I’m focusing on specific ways to move forward with our photography.

Its important that we don’t try and be over ambitious – we all know that two weeks into that radical new diet we’re probably going to end up diving head first into a big bag of doughnuts. Our photographic resolutions aren’t any different. For a couple of years I tried “the one photo every day” challenge – the aim being to take and publish one photo to Flickr every day for a year. By the middle of February I’d failed. Why? Mostly because I was too busy to keep it up. I take a lot of photos over the course of a year, but taking one every day was just too much to fit into my busy life. Ironically the reason for my failure was probably down to the amount of photographic work I had on. I was too busy editing photos, designing layouts and managing customer documents.

So, where do we start on our achievable resolutions? Take some time to take stock of where you are with your photography. Look back through the past 12 months of photographs critically and identify what you perceive as your strengths and weaknesses. I’m trying to get into the habit of compiling a book of photos each year. Blurb do excellent quality hardback books for fairly reasonable prices (I always use their Proline uncoated paper which has a fantastic matt finish). The process of distilling twelve months of photos into a “greatest hits” compilation really gets me taking a long hard and critical look at my work. The finished result serves as both a record of my photographic journey as well as providing a great collection of family memories.

Start small and keep it simple. You don’t have to resolve to turn your world upside down to make a difference. Pick something small and achievable, and when you make it through the year you’ll feel good about it. Maybe decide on one area that you want to work on in your photography and make sure you actively think about that before each click of the shutter. This could be taking time to ask yourself “is this the best composition I can create here” or just taking time to look around the image as a whole and concentrating on the details more (one of the things I’ve struggled with in the past).

Resolve to take some me-time on a regular basis. I love to get out and go for a long walk in the countryside alone or with the dogs. This gives me space to collect my thoughts and I find this is when I do my best creative thinking. When I’m at home or in the office I’m surrounded by distractions – television, phone calls, Facebook, twitter, text messages and all sorts of other things. Quite often I plan concepts for photo shoots or training courses while I’m out walking – when I get back I grab my notebook and write it all down so it doesn’t get forgotten about once the distractions are back.

One of my personal goals this year is to spend more time using the equipment I already have and less time window-shopping. It’s always very exciting when the latest camera or lens turns up but I’m pretty sure that the limiting factor in my photography isn’t so much the camera as the photographer. I’m hoping I can spend some quality time getting to know my equipment better in the coming 12 months. I’ve found that almost every bit of kit requires a few thousand photos before you really start to understand it’s “personality” – whether that be compact cameras, camera bodies, lenses, filters, speed lights, studio flashes or even reflectors and light modifiers.

Although I’ve said I’m staying away from the usual new years things of diet and exercise, another way I’m looking to encourage my personal creativity in 2015 is by taking better care of myself in general. One of my biggest problems is not knowing when it’s time to step away from what I’m working on and take a break. My inner creative thrives on being fed a healthy diet and kept well rested, so although I’m not going all out on the latest fad diet or exercise plan, I am planning to try and keep myself in better shape. This is the thing I’m probably going to find the hardest to stick to!

Finally the thing I’d suggest everyone resolves to do in the coming year is this: spend time photographing the things that make you happy. Spend some time rediscovering the aspects of photography that you really love. The more you enjoy your photography the more you’ll get stuck in, and the more you get stuck in the faster you’ll improve.