I wish you all a very happy New Year! May your 2007 be filled with fun, family and photographs. I don’t believe in resolutions because they are so easy to blow off, so I’m more of a goal setter. Reasonable goals are the thing for me. One year I set the goal to do the dishes more regularly, another year I made the goal to make a new lifelong friend, and that’s when I met my best friend, Wendy. Goals can be powerful things or fun and ridiculous. I’ve got my share of goofy goals for this year, but one of my big goals is to refine my photography. I want to learn my Nikon inside and out. How this will manifest itself remains to be seen, but I think I’ll choose a function each month and explore it - like the remote flash or playing with white balance, or learning RAW.

What’s great about photography is that there is always something to learn and it takes a lifetime to learn it. If you’re interested in the concept of Mastery, I have a great book recommendation. It’s called Zen in the Art of Archery, by Eugen Harrigel. It’s not a hokey guru book, but a nice little book by one of the first Westerners to learn the mastery of archery in Japan during the 1950’s. This book was first recommended to me in a Product Photography class at Art Center College of Design when I went to school there. It’s great for applying the mastery philosophy to photography, because whenever the author referrs to shooting an arrow, just think about shooting a photograph. It’s a good read for the start of the new year.