We had some great comments on Why Set Your Photography Goals? Shows how important it is to define and clearly state your goals.

Now that you’ve stated your goals, how to arrive at them so they don’t get lost like all those New Years resolutions (exercise more, don’t eat____, walk the dog every day, clean my office, garage, car, etc.,  be nice to____) that start to fade by the end of Jan 1st!

Once you have stated your goals, what’s the next step? Strategic planning. Wikipedia defines it as:

“Strategic planning is an organization’s process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy, including its capital and people.”

This applies to each of us as individual photographers, as well as any organization we have.  What are your directions and your strategy to get to your goal, and what are your decisions about allocating your resources?

Here’s a simple example from Annie Liebovitz’ new book At Work:

“The first thing I did with my very first camera was climb Mt Fuji. Climbing Mt Fuji is a lesson in determination and moderation. It would be fair to ask if I took the moderation part to heart. But it certainly was a lesson in respecting your camera. If I was going to live with this thing, I was going to have to think about what that meant. There weren’t going to be any pictures without it.”

Boil it down to determination and getting to know her camera, and as she said later, taking it with her everywhere, shooting tons of pictures.

Ansel Adams came up with the strategy of moving photography from simply being a recording device, to using the whole process as a means to capture and show the world what he visualized.  Remember, we largely have him, and his pals, to thank for moving photography from being simply an illustration means  to being a fine art—something we tend to take for granted. He operated on a long-term strategy to accomplish that goal.

So now that you have your goals worked out, let’s define your strategy, get out your paper and do this (and yes leave them as comments too so we can learn from you.)

1.    What are your decisions and your directions to yourself? Look at Annie’s above “I’ve got to be determined and I’ve got to get to know and respect my camera.” Yours could be as simple as “take at least one shot a day, even if it’s with my iPhone!”

2.    What are your resources?  This includes your time, equipment, classes, models, etc. Just take a good look around. In an upcoming episode of PhotoShow you’ll hear Thomas Hawk talk about how he steals moments during the day to get shots— waiting for a meeting to start, or walking to one—just grab those moments and fill them with your shots!

3.    Now get clever and work out your strategy to make use of these points to arrive at your goals.

You might ask what my goals and strategy are?

A big one is to make PhotoShow a hit by bringing to you those who have mastered photography. I came up with the idea for PhotoShow after teaching many, many workshops and realizing there simply were no great resources for hearing directly from the masters of photography (I’m a big fan of hearing, or better seeing, those who have excelled in a subject. Sometimes you learn just by watching their expressions or seeing their examples.) So I decided to put the show together and put viewers directly in touch with Ansel Adams (we have unreleased footage that we’ll be rolling out) Annie Leibovitz, Chase Jarvis (we’ll open with this soon, I promise), Thomas Hawk, and we’ll just continue on this journey…

No matter what you put in your strategy it has to include seeing more of other’s work and expanding your knowledge. I hope to help you along the way with both.

BTW, subscribe to my blog so you can be part of the conversation, I also put out tweets between posts so follow me on twitter here as well as on FaceBook and FriendFeed.

Good shooting in 2009!