My New Year Photography Goals as a Landscape and Commercial Photographer 2026

Welcome back to my blog, and welcome to 2026; Happy New Year!

I hope that you had a wonderful, restful Christmas and that you managed to find some time to relax and shoot during the break.

That being said, it’s time to get back into it and think about the year ahead and what you want to achieve. In this blog I am going to share some of my goals for the year and I’ll evaluate these and let you know how I get on throughout the year taking a final look at these at the end of the year - hopefully you will be able to learn something from all of the mistakes that I am bound to make!

In a blog post before the Christmas break, I spoke about new year’s resolutions and how I don’t make them. I don’t think they (for me) are the right way to bring about any sort of meaningful change in my life. What I do like however, is setting goals and targets for myself, as well as learning new skills.

Photography seems like a great place to learn some skills and set some goals and what follows this is some of the targets I have set myself.

None of these are going to be about growing on social media. I’m not here to do that, I don’t have a magic wand or the “secret sauce” that I can give to you. I haven’t even really figured it out for myself so it isn’t something I feel that I can speak about with any authority. I also don’t like setting goals that aren’t within my full control. I can try to influence other people to like my content, but ultimately, they will either like it or they won’t. My social media strategy is about posting what I like and what I enjoy and if someone chooses to engage with it, great! But, I can’t make people like my work and I don’t know how the alogorithms work well enough to give you guidance.

So now that’s out of the way, let’s have a look at some of the goals I have set for myself. I am hoping that writing them down and sharing them will bring an extra bit of accountability!

1) Go out and shoot every month.

This one I think will be fairly easy to tick off, especially now that I have given myself some kind of accountability for doing it. I live in one of the most beautiful parts of the entire country(landscape photography in the Lake District really is a gift) and I have some of this beauty on my doorstep. There are things I want explore in photography, macro being one of these things. Getting out into nature reserves and local spots can yield some incredible results and I want to be able to explore these spots in more detail, but I want to explore more places as well… See point 6!

This is also going to mean, for me at least, that my content on social media will stay more relevant and it might even give me enought decent images to do a calendar this year!

2) Build the community aspect of my website.

This one is going to need some research and some serious time investment. I want it to be effective and I want it to be free. I don’t know what this looks like yet, but I am keen to explore the idea and to build it - it would be great to run some kind of meet-up with like minded photgraphers to walk, chat, hang out, take photos and maybe have some nerdy gear talk with other people who get it! Look out for more news in future blogs, keep and eye on the website and make sure you are signed up to my newsletter via the contact page, to get information about it first hand!

3) Sell at least one landscape photography workshop.

I have sold only sold one of these, and I need to work on the marketing a little bit. I love to share my knowledge and skills with people and this can be a great way to do that, so if you want to develop your skills or learn a new technique, get in touch and lets chat!

These can be tailored to you, be you a beginner or a more experienced photographer… let’s go and shoot!

4) Get my print store back up and running and sell enough prints to be able to buy a new set of inks for my printer.

Again, we are talking about something that needs time and this ones needs some money spending as well. Printer ink isn’t cheap and to avoid wasting it (and it’s almost empty!), I print my stuff quite often for my own use, but buying a new set of inks for my printer can cost around £500! I love selling the prints because I love the idea that people want to display my work and it also means that the printer can stay fulling functioning and not just become something else to dust!

The time needed to do this is not in considerable - I’ve already done and evaluated the market research for this, but now I need to edit the images to get them ready for print and then get them uploaded to my shop in a way which gives people an idea of what they are buying. The printing and posting part of this is the easy bit, but all the work that needs to go into this before getting to the print stage is massive and juggling this and working full time means that the days can end up being very long indeed!

5) Try something different with my photography - I think this is likely to be intentional camera movement.

Fairly straightforward this one. I want to add some more creativity into some of the stuff I am doing and this is a free way to to do that! I also have a macro lens which I don’t use as much as I could do and with winter in full flow and the spring colours and textures starting to come to the forefront of our minds, this could be a great time to really enhance this skill and make some use of the kit that I already have…

6) Shoot in at least one new location each month.

This ties in really nicely with point number one and if I can compelte this one, by default I complete number one this last as well. Each time I visit somewhere new, I enhance my knowledge and I also get ideas for things to write here… coming to think of it, twelve new locations is twelve blogs for the year and that also saves more brain space for other things, as this is 12 weeks where I won’t need to have an extra idea for some to write about.

Laziness aside, this one is actually really important to me because I still don’t feel like I have explored anywhere near of much of The Lake District as I should have done after having lived here for almost 3 years now. It’s a big old place and there is a lot of stuff to photograph.

Part of me thinks that I have been a bit lazy, but the other part of me knows that this is because I have found some preferred locations that I like to get to - they are all quite close to home and are achievable in an evening after work. I need to broaden my horizons!

7) Develop my woodland photography skills.

I live near a lot of woodland but don’t have many shots of it. A big part of the reason for this is that woodland photography is notoriously tricky. There are often busy, messy and cluttered scenes that we need to make sense of. This is something that isn’t my forte, but by the end of the year, I am determined that I am going to be better at this… watch this space… and my Instagram…

8) Explore macro photography as way to broaden my skills in landscape photography

I’ve already touched on this one, but it really is something that I want to get better at. We are surrounded by beauty in The Lake District and tons of different textures which can make really effective abstract photos. I’d also like to be able to get some good photos and some of the strange little mushrooms that crop up. Oh and did someone mention bluebell season? Again, this is something I will be blogging about, so watch this space. Oh and one more thing, did I mention you can sign up to my newsletter for more regular updates?

9) Shoot more personal/portfolio work for the commercial side of my business and in doing so, increase my knowledge and skills in studio lighting.

This is probably the biggest one for me as I know that I need to work on my lighting skills (as well as my set building!). I am all to acutely aware that the commercial offering in my portfolio is in need of a refresh - the photos don’t reflect my current skill level so it’s little wonder that no one is really noticing these shots. There’s a lot to think about, but fortunately I already have the kit I need, I just need to work out how to put it to gainful employment!

10) Carry on enjoying doing what I love.

Speaks for itself does this one! I love photography, I love editing, I love creating and I love learning more about it every day, so it really a no brainer and I promise to keep sharing what I learn, how I have learned it and probably, most importantly, how I learned it. Keep coming back to the blog so that you can learn from my mistakes… there will probably be plenty of them!

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