Your Goals Affect Your Planning

Take a picture and try and earn some of the gas money back. Louis.

Louis Shalako

Your goals affect your planning.

Planning should be as flexible as possible in case you encounter fresh opportunities.

When shopping for marketing images I of course became aware that private individuals, pros and amateurs, were uploading the very pictures I was buying to further my career in writing, covers for my books essentially.

So I checked around and found a few other stock photo sites. Quite a number of them have provision for uploading photos. It is the digital age, and the pictures have to come from somewhere.

***

Dimly I realize that this is nothing particularly new to the photographic industry. It’s really only news to me!

But…

No longer is it necessary to sign up for an account, (by mail or in person,) to mail or hand in envelopes full of prints, have an editor with a light table or a magnifying glass go over them, have clerks stack them up on shelves and technicians photo-chemically reproduce them whenever someone, came to the counter, called or faxed in because they needed one.

***

The point is that if I can download a picture in a trice, I can sure as hell upload one just as fast.

And I have a camera.

I take a lot of pictures…I’m actually pretty good at it, although my present camera isn’t very good.

So, the goal of publishing a few books opened up new possibilities, new markets, taking advantage of recreational free time doing something l like. That is true for literature and it’s also true for other creative endeavors.

Okay, so I have opened up an account on one stock photo site.

That’s enough to get me started.

Assuming I can comb through my files and come up with a few images that might be suitable, it might even be enough to begin to generate sales. There will be mostly likely revenue thresholds before payment is made, there will be W8EN forms and all that sort of thing. But the experience gained in publishing crosses over very nicely, no matter what you are selling on the internet. I could sell lawn-mowers on Amazon and still have to fill out the same digital paperwork.

Now, working with images ever more intensely will obviously assist in the learning curve for the development of better covers. Also, one of my goals is to get a new computer, one that is capable of operating Adobe’s latest photo-shop program. I’ve spoken about this before. And Adobe could be used with a good camera and my talent at special effects….(ta-da!) to create photos for upload and sale on a stock photo site.

Pretty brilliant, eh?

Now, now, ladies and gentlemen, when I go for a cruise, a bike-ride, a walk in the woods, or just see a pretty girl behind a rack of cauliflower at the farmer’s market, well now I have the all-important justification, something none of us can really do without, and I can bloody well ask for a picture now, can’t I?

All I need is a cool screen name and a nice portfolio; and a man with some element of charm just might do all right.

I love it when a good plan comes together, as Hannibal Smith would say.

So now, a new goal is to get a better camera. Not only that, I need a big long lens, and a wide one too, a handful of filters maybe, and a detachable flash unit, maybe a remote. A tripod and a bag to put it all in, and ladies and gentlemen, this obviously affects the planning.

That’s because you have to plan in order to achieve your goals.

But what is immediately obvious is also how it all ties together—almost as if I had foreseen all of this quite some time ago. New computer, new software, new camera, it all has to be bought and paid for, and if we can somehow, along the way, begin to build systems so that all of this can be paid for, then that is just one small aspect of our planning.

Planning begins with goal-setting, visualization of the end results, and then working, step by step and piece by piece, one day at a time some days, or even minute by minute when things aren’t going so good, and we work our way to the end result.

Hopefully that makes some weird kind of sense.

And, over the long haul, there are any number of stock photo sites out there, and as the body of work grows, the chances of making a sale increase.

It’s just a matter of putting in the time and getting good at what you do.

All of these little goals go towards achieving a much greater goal, which has to do with independence, quality of life, and how I choose to spend the rest of my life.

So there you go and now you know.

END