Big improvements in photography rarely come from a single breakthrough moment.

What they come from is result of small, deliberate actions, repeated consistently, that compound into something that is a total shift from where you started.

12 months is a long time, but the days that make up that year will pass quickly. We often overestimate what we can do in a day, but underestimate what we can do in a year. The things you do in that year shouldn’t come down to motivation, gear or talent. They should come down to the commitments you make, and actually putting them into action

These are the habits and shifts that can honestly lead to dramatic change over the next year.

These are all changes I’ve learned and slowly embraced over the last decade.

Last year was my ‘best year’ as a photographer, and I measure that solely on how I feel about the photos I’ve taken. The photos shown in this blog are a result of putting all of these changes together, and if you can do this in a year, will get you to where you want to be much quicker than I did.

Stop waiting for the ‘right time’ to start

Nothing will sabotage your photography more effectively than waiting to be ‘ready’.

Waiting to feel more confident. Waiting to be better. Waiting until you can afford the right camera, or waiting until your circumstances change.

Progress only happens once you put action first. Not a perfect version of action, ANY action.

In it’s simplest form, photography is a numbers game. The more you shoot over time, the more chances you give yourself to learn, fail, adjust, and improve. Planning might feel really productive, but it doesn’t actually get you anywhere.

If you want real change in the next year, you have to start before you feel ready. You’ll never feel ready anyway, because nobody ever does.

Make volume your advantage

Big improvements in photography don’t come from chasing the best photos. They come from creating hundreds, if not thousands of images.

The more you shoot, the more chances you give yourself to learn what works, what doesn’t, and what you can do better next time. In turn, this helps to steer your preference and direction, and get’s you to a sense of your own style faster.

One year of shooting consistently will teach you more than years of occasional sunrise or travel shoots. That’s not because every photo will be good (a very high percentage of them will be total crap, which is fine, and normal!) but it is because patterns in what you are shooting start to emerge. You start to understand what works for you.

Lose the plan, and be more open

If you follow the above, I reckon that the best photographs you’ll take this year won’t be at all planned.

They’ll come naturally as a result of being present and curious. Trying to tick off a checklist of shots you decided you have to get can (and probably will) just set you up for failure. The expectations we have when we start to chase certain images are usually left unmet.

I don’t think that you can really predict when a really good photography will appear, so all you can really do is make yourself available for it to happen.

Take your camera everywhere

One of the fastest ways to improve over the next year is actually pretty simple: always have a camera with you.

I don’t mean that you should photograph everything, but having it and being open to it begins to fine tune your awareness. So much of photography comes down to being aware of what is actually happening around you.

When you always have a camera with you (and I mean a proper one, not a phone which to me equals distraction):

You notice light, shadow, and the subtle changes in between.
You begin to be able to predict behaviours, making photographic moments easier to spot
You get more intentional, and more selective about what’s really worth taking a picture of

This compounds into building decisiveness. Your artistic intention sharpens. In turn, this helps enormously with editing and workflow. Mainly because you aren’t faced with thousands of average shots. It takes time, like with all of this, but it happens.

Work with your limitations

Fighting the limitations from which you cannot get away from is a sure fire way to burn yourself out creatively. I know this because I have done this. More than once.

Most of us can’t really change the amount of spare time we have for photography. You can’t move locations on a whim. You can’t easily step away from family life, work or other responsibilities.

These aren’t excuses though, they’re limitations.

I see two big mistakes here. One is when people wait for these limitations to change or disappear which they rarely do. The other is fighting against them which only ever leads to frustration and annoyance, neither are good mates with heightened creativity in my experience!

Life is happening and getting in the way for all of us, no matter how it may seem. The only way thorough is learning how to work with it.

So design your photography and creative practice around the life you have, not the one you wish you had. It might feel slow at times, and you may wish it was different, but this is your reality. if you work with it rather than fight it, you’ll realise that this is the only way to make real progress this year.

Make it easier to create

One of the fastest ways to hamper any progress is trying to make your photography really impressive instead of sustainable.

Whilst very cool, doing impressive stuff and photographing it is practically impossible to maintain for all but the most nomadic (and they’re not reading this, I assure you!). Any attempts to continue working in this way will quickly fall apart.

So the goal needs to be to reduce friction in our creativity:

Have fewer steps between idea and action
Make simpler gear choices, limiting where you can
Have realistically low expectations. of results, of locations, of subjects and of conditions.

If making photos is too hard, you’ll either burn out or be incredibly inconsistent. On the flip-side, if it’s too easy, you’ll get bored and disengage.

Any kind of real change happens in the middle. Effort should be required, but the resistance you feel from it is low enough to keep going.

Capture your thoughts as well as photos

If you want to grow as a photographer, you need to pay attention to how your brain works just as much as what you are shooting.

Ideas can quickly leave you, often as as fast as they appear. You can easily forget the things you have learned, and fail to recognise patterns in your work. That is, until, you starting getting things out of your head and written down.

These might be in the form of:

Notes on your phone
Journaling
Voice memos
Post shoot breakdowns, learnings and reflections.

I’ve had so many ideas that have been lost and forgotten. The only way to give myself any sort of chance of remembering and fulfilling all of the amazingly creative things my brains comes up with is to get them recorded, organised and keep coming back to them.

Over time, a lot of these ideas lose any incentive, they fade from being something I want to chase. Which is fine because there are a lot more that often end up becoming something huge.

Show up

If you want visible progress in a year, you need to be consistent. One of the best ways of being consistent is through accountability.

Choose somewhere to regularly do your thing. This isn’t about being accountable to an audience of followers (although it can be), it’s about being accountable to yourself.

What could this be? Well, anything! But some suggestions:

A blog or Substack
YouTube - shorts or long form
Instagram - reels, posts or stories
An email newsletter
Or even a regular photo walk that you never miss

It doesn’t have to be something public, but it does have to be consistent.

Consistency gives you proof. Proof builds confidence. Confidence feeds momentum.

I’ve seen this myself over the last two years. I promised myself I’d put a video on YouTube every week, and have fulfilled this more than 95% of the time. It’s had a huge impact not just on my work, but on my confidence, my direction, my subscriber numbers, and in turn my income. I also now don’t even think about whether or not I’m going to ‘do the thing’ this week - it just happens automatically.

A quick note on ‘missing one’. This will happen, to everyone. What is important is how you react. I know the temptation is to think ‘I’ve failed, f*ck it what’s the point’ (I’m, sure that many of us have seen this when following a diet!), but that just wastes all the work you’ve done before.

Accept what’s happened, it cannot be changed. All you can do is forget about it and carry on, because life is something that often get’s in the way.

In a few weeks time, that missed action will be totally insignificant, whilst the significance of stopping remains enormous.

Build confidence through evidence

As much as you might like to think it, confidence does not come from watching more videos, reading more books or learning more stuff. Knowledge doesn’t give you confidence, but it can feel like an easy way to build it. It’s a trap!

The only thing that does build any real confidence is the evidence of your own actions.

Learning about composition might be helpful in a sense, but only if you do something with that. Like creating 30 images for a project.

SEEING your progress beats knowing stuff every single time.

If you want to feel more confident over the next year, you need something tangible to guide you.

Don’t fake it

This shouldn’t ever be about pretending to be someone you’re not.

It’s about embodying the person, the photographer, the creative that you want to become.

Work out what future you wants their life to be, and take steps everyday towards that. What you are doing should be fun, fulfilling, and tie in with your personal values.

If any element of it doesn’t feel like ‘you’, chasing that will quickly become pretty difficult, which is exactly where consistency falls apart. So many people tie themselves in knots with this trying to please an algorithm (aka the masses) which is why cretive brunout is so rife in the modern age. You cannot chase validation with everything you do, because it may never come anyway.

You might ‘blow up’, get popular and still be doing what you love. If this happens, that’s great, please tell me your secrets! But if it doesn’t, that’s great too because you are doing this for YOU and you alone.

Do this ONE THING today

If you want this year to matter, don’t just read this blog and make a few notes. You have to actually start RIGHT NOW because otherwise it will be forgotten pretty quickly.

Write a letter to future you, with a promise of the answers to these three questions:

What are you going to start doing this week that will dramatically improve your photography over time?
Where are you going to show up consistently, even when nobody is watching?
What are you going to stop waiting for?

Put that note somewhere visible. That’s your contract with yourself. That’s what you have to be accountable towards for the next year, at least.

Then start.

Make something today that didn’t exist yesterday.

Final thoughts

A year is more than enough time to transform your photography but only if you stop treating change as something that happens to you.

Change happens because of what you repeatedly do.

Think of you in a year if you do all of this (or even just some of it) Vs you if you don’t….

I think that the real goal here is avoiding the regret of knowing in a years time that you could have started now.

Good luck, I can’t wait to see what you do!

If you want help getting unstuck and want to start building momentum, I’ve created a FREE Creative Reset guide to help you move from thinking to making. You can download this here.

How to transform your photography in just 1 year