• Creativity is a combination of inspiration and perspiration, i.e., thinking it AND doing it. You can have the best idea ever for photographing the Grand Tetons but, if you don’t take the picture, you can hardly claim to have been creative because you created nothing!
• We generally don’t fail at creativity. We simply don’t recognize when we are creative, e.g., changing a recipe to make it more to our liking or putting together a deal at the office. When we do fail, it is most often because we fear failure or criticism. A corollary to this is: Everyone is creative.
• To improve our ability to be creative, it takes practice, practice, and more practice both within our chosen genre and outside it. If you are a nature photographer, take portraits to improve your creativity; if you are a portraitist, photograph some flowers or landscapes. Familiarity breeds complacency.

So, what does creativity have to do with gear and technique? Everything! While some might say that vision or creativity is everything. I simply can’t agree. If you have the vision for a photograph but don’t have the technique or the equipment to make the image, you can’t really be creative because you can’t turn that vision into reality.

My approach to the question of vision, technique, and gear is more nuanced than most. I think that any one of them can be more important than another depending on the image and what you want to accomplish with the image. While creativity is important in all images, gear can be too. Some wildlife images, particularly of birds, simply require long glass and, without it, some images are just impossible or nearly so.

Don’t get me wrong here! I believe that creativity is the heart and soul of any photograph, particularly a great one, e.g., Moon over Half Dome. However, let’s not forget technique, e.g., lighting, and gear, e.g., wide-angle lenses for landscapes, are sometimes necessary to the creative process.

So, without further delay, here is what I learned or had an insight about:

• It isn’t easy to take a picture every day when you have a full time job and have a life to live. Things get in the way.
• It is impossible to get a “good” image every day, at least one that satisfies my definition of a “good” image. After a long day, you are sometime not very creative!
• There is no such thing as a irredeemable image. However, I will readily concede that some photographs aren’t very good (Image for June 5, 2011), some are real stinkers (Image for August 11, 2011), and some exceed all expectations (Image for May 19, 2011).
• You can learn something from every photograph that you take, whether good or bad, processed or not, deleted or saved. In the end, you can learn as much from the good ones as the not so good ones and I had some real stinkers to learn from.
• When you look back at a year’s catalog of photographs, you can learn a lot about yourself. At the end of 2011, I could easily see the genres of photography that I favored, e.g., nature, and others that I completely ignored, e.g., portraits.
• If you want to improve your photography, nothing works like practice and having a resolution or dedicating yourself to a project is a good way to make sure that you take pictures. In 2011, I took almost 100,000 images. (The grip on my Nikon D700 became well worn in 2011.)
• An open-ended project, such as an image a day, allows you to experiment and take images that you otherwise wouldn’t take. Of those 100,000 images, I deleted about 67,000. In the first couple of months as it became clear how hard it was to take an image every day, I stopped self-censoring myself and allowed myself to experiment. Most of the experiments were dismal failures but some were not and you will see more of those this year.
• As a result of experimentation, you start to see and take images that you never would have taken before. I did (Image for December 24, 2011).

I consider the last year one of my best. In large part because of this exercise, I certainly “see” more and better than before I took on this resolution. I have also picked up on a new goal for 2012: To improve my portrait skills.

This image of the beach at Rehoboth Beach, DE, completes my resolution for 2011 to take and post an image every day. While not all of them got posted on the day they were taken, I did take an image every day during the year to post on this blog. In some cases, the image was posted a day or two later because I didn’t have access to the Internet or for some other unavoidable reason. What an experience! I learned a lot and will post a summary early next week.

1. Posting to www.BrianJZwit.com: Keep and expand this website by posting at least one written post and one image with an explanation of the image every week.
2. Posting to www.BlueRidgeWorkshops.com: Post at least two written posts to the Blue Ridge Workshop website every month with one of those being a DIY post as well as two images per month to the Blue Ridge Workshop Facebook pages.
3. Lightroom 4: Once Lightroom 4 is released (should be in the first few months of 2012), write and release an e-book on Lightroom 4. The book will improve and elaborate on the materials that I use to teach From Capture to Output: Digital Workflow Using Lightroom 3 for Blue Ridge Workshops.

I am limiting myself here to three resolutions to allow myself some flexibility. While my intent is to fully complete each one of these goals, I know, as a pragmatist, that things don’t always go the way that we want them to. I also know that I will add tasks and goals to 2012 other than those in this post when circumstances or the needs of my business change. I will let you know when I add or change any of these resolutions.

Much more so than this year, I will also be documenting my progress on these resolutions and discussing nature, photography, and nature photography on this blog. I hope you will follow along.

Best wishes for 2012…

A short quote from Martin Luther King’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo, Norway, December 10, 1964, now engraved in the wall at the Martin Luther King National Memorial in Washington, DC. With war in the Middle East and Afganistan and famine in Africa, I believe this image and the quote are appropriate for this Christmas.

The best of the holidays to you and yours…