Dec 10th Newsletter - Happy New Year!
Hey all,
Happy New Year! I hope you all found value in the final days of 2025 - whether celebrating with fireworks, friends, or taking some quiet reflective time to process everything that happened in the last year. I took a few weeks away from newsletters, but I have a *resolution* to express more through writing in 2026.
Have you got any resolutions? I used to be solid on goal setting when I was an athlete, as I had a pretty simple plan: get better. I was happy to grind away at training and it tracked progressional reward pretty linearly. Deep focus while engaging in a physical skill came more naturally, even while tired or foggy.
I’m no spring-chook in the mornings. I feel very un-creative and mentally feel like I’ve been struck by a bus going downhill. With creative pursuits, I find it trickier to consistently grind away at specific creative goals while exhausted or juggling a lot of peripheral tasks.
I can spend so much time wearing different hats that I can forget to give myself permission to actually make the work that matters, and enjoy the process. There are daily pressures of being a bookkeeper, marketer, brand & website designer, content creator, copywriter, salesman, CRM & SEO manager, handling packing, shipping, archiving, and licensing deals. That’s before even considering your actual craft - in the case of a photographer, that can be a creative director, lighting & colour designer, technical camera operator, drone pilot, staging, or printmaking. Then you’ve got to remember to actually be creative, the one thing that the rest crumbles without. Oh, and don’t expect it to make much money with it bucko.
Making stuff as a hobby vs making professionally can feel pretty distinct - and I want to do a better job in 2026 of not allowing professional work to influence my personal creative headspace. I’m opting to front load the activities that don’t need much of my grey matter - exercise, emails, monotonous business tasks. The idea is to offload the guilt I associate with creative time - where I feel I should be doing more business tasks that generate a living, and treating ‘making’ time as a negotiable or secondary pursuit. By ensuring the ‘important’ tasks are done early, I want to grant flexibility to afternoon/evenings to either continue work OR delve into creative ideas, without 20 gmail notifications serenading me.
This is a short newsletter, but I’m going to wrap up with a few photography goals I have going into 2026:
Get some of my work made in their largest forms. Think 40x60” canvases & metal or 24x36” frames.
Exploring the gallery scene
Actually entering photo competitions (10 years and I never really touched them. Silly huh?)
Work on getting past perfectionism on every little sidequest that just serves to slow down the fail -> improve cycle. Eg. I can count on one hand how many websites I have ever designed, so expecting to make a perfect one with minimal experience sounds silly out loud.
Re-upping my service-based photography. As a new resident to California in 2025, I only recently received work permits to live in the US with my wife during her studies - and need to make new connections to collaborate on creative + professional portraiture or architectural images.
And the fun stuff:
Explore more abstract, macro, & mixed media works.
A goal is to learn the ropes of watercolour & acrylic paint, partly as a means to experiment with mixed media.
Some of my favourite ‘landscape’ images are a kind of macro or abstract scene from a larger environment. I am keen as to experiment with more ideas along this vein without the pressure of it being print-worthy.
Begin a photo project analyzing Silicon Valley and current tech movements. There is a lot happening digitally, but seeing what is happening on the ground is rarely seen. I don’t plan to pull punches in my honest interpretations out here.
Maybe use for a story-driven photobook
Of course, landscape images of the Bay Area
???
Do you have any fun creative goals / ideas for 2026? Let me know, I’d love to hear what you’re getting up to!
Cheers,
Murph
