Goal Setting for Documentary Photographers

Contrary to most business books, magazines, white papers and articles, I've never been good at setting goals. Experts say that goals need to written down and specific (there seems to be a lot of numbers involved in most goal-setting examples).

But what I do have is vision. I know what I'd like to see accomplished with documentary projects and visualize what the end results will look like. Then , I look at what steps might be needed to achieve those results. There is usually less stress involved in this approach rather than meeting self-imposed deadlines and number crunching.

My vision for my documentary work for the coming year involves four items:

1. See "Florida Soup" printed, published and on store bookshelves. I am currently involved with tweaking the final manuscript and photographs with the publisher.

2. Complete a significant amount of work for the statewide project, "Back Roads to Back Home: Finding the Voices of the Sunshine State."

3. Get a handle on blogging and social media. To do this, I will be working on a social media experiment combining old-school tradition photography (influenced by the work of Atget, Penn, and Avedon) with the latest social media methods. Okay, there might be some numbers involved with this one: something like "add____ number of new visitors or "Likes" from Facebook based on this experiment)

4. Begin a local project (Volusia County) focusing on the positive perspectives of people at work and at play.

Re-Use and Sustainability

A new photographic / oral history session:

“Seems like the more civilized we get, the worse off we are. Wasn’t it Nero who fiddled while Rome burned?” asked Dan Hiscock. It was a different start to our conversation but it was hard to avoid the news from the day.

In what would become apparent in a short while, it was a day of contrasts. The negativity of the times with the contentment and satisfaction of an individual devoted to sustainability and self-resiliency.

Dan has kept his hands dirty in a lifetime dedicated to hard work. Now retired, he is devoted to two pursuits: gardening and mechanics, which lately has involved building cookers/smokers out of recycled parts.