Adios 2024, Welcome 2025.

A small postmortem and a very positive future.

All photos by the author.

Hi, and welcome to my little Substack corner. I write about photography, art, design, and the craft of living creatively. I am glad you are here. Consider subscribing to keep up with what I am doing. I promise not to bore you. If you would like to support my efforts, that would be amazing and so appreciated. Either way, I am super happy you are here.

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to all of you this fine Sunday.

This is my wrap-up post, and then I will only have one more post this year before I take a much-needed break.

I want to share with you some of the things I want to do next year and reminisce about 2024. Just a little.

A few things I am happy for:

1. I jumped back into traditional music composition after working with MuseScore and Dorico. I have shared a few pieces on YouTube, but most of the work awaits the final touches. The software is like After Effects for music, so there are a lot of things to learn. I want to dive into the Midi style of DAWs to do a few more orchestral works… but that will be after May 2025.

2. The huge collection of images we did for the P52 Members came out amazing. Hat’s off to Mag Cloud for a unique offering. 11x17 Landscape, wire-bound, huge pages, and lovely printing.
   You can purchase the hard-copy of Collective 2024 for yourself or a friend here.

3. Published a book that had been languishing for a couple of months. Seen and Noted is a collection of rather mundane subjects I had noticed on various road trips and walkabouts.

4. A couple of extended road trips were a blast: twice to Utah for extended visits, then a couple of trips to southern Arizona to see some places I hadn’t seen before.

5. I didn’t spend nearly enough time on my bike. Sigh.

Some things I am planning:

1. Since I put very few miles on my bike, I need to remedy that starting mid-January. I have 6 small road trips planned for winter and spring and am hoping for at least 30 days out this summer in Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Colorado. No itinerary, just me and my beast. Two lanes, two wheels, and a camera.

2. I am planning on bringing Project 52 Assignments to YouTube. This will be part of a 2-post per week plan to deliver a commentary and an assignment each week.

3. I have to make some decisions concerning my writing at Medium. The writing schedule is too heavy trying to do something for both platforms. Not sure what I am going to do about Medium, but I have to decide soon.

4. I am going to start a daily creative exercise for myself. At least one image, design, logo, tune… whatever. One per day to be added to a blog devoted to that creative journal.

5. More special content for the Premium Members. With all of the incredible tools Substack is giving us to use, I am creating a plan to make it exciting to be a Premium Member.

6. Opening my design and web agency. This has been in the works for too long, and we launch February 1.

Things to watch for in 2025:

1. AI tools that are not necessarily photography-oriented. I am not interested in doing or seeing work generated by AI. But I am really excited about some of the tools that are super beneficial to the other aspects of our business.
   Perplexity is an amazing research tool that can help in various ways. I use it instead of Google now, and the answers are not manipulated by advertising.
   NotebookLM helps you learn something faster than you would think possible. It is one of my new favorite tools.
   GROK2 (X). From design and idea prompting to deep dives into the technical tools we use everyday, this thing is incredible.

   Claude. Need email copy fast, a three paragraph blurb for a cold email, an idea for what to do next… all can be done with Claude. Learning to customize it to make it yours is important, and rather easy.
   Ask Chat GPT to do a review of an image, or give you a tag list for your website… and get ready to be amazed.

2. More work. There is a pent-up need for photography, and many of our top ad agencies and brands have forbidden the use of AI, so get your work out to the world and start promoting like you have never promoted before. It will pay off. And there is a free class to help you understand how to do that here.

3. An emphasis on authenticity. In your work. In your business. In your everyday interactions, authenticity will be the best personal brand you can have.

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Classes I am planning for Q1 include a deep dive product workshop combined with the business class, and an editorial photography workshop combined with a client acquisition course.

That’s it for the year.

A huge thank you for sticking with me this year and thank you for the comments and emails that have brightened my days. Best wishes to you and yours for 2025. I will post my 50 favorite things next Saturday just for fun.

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When you are ready, here is how I can help you succeed.

Group Mentorship: a small group of photographers who meet to show images, work on their portfolio, and build their businesses with help from a wonderful group. Lifetime membership for one fee.

One-on-one Mentorship: You and me - working together in an intense 6-month push to get you on the way to over $30K in additional revenue. The work we lay down will help you increase and scale your business for years ahead.

Coming in 2025, a One-on-One, 6-week plan to get your marketing system in place. You will see results immediately, and by results, I mean assigned work that pays you. More coming.