Happy New Year to Everyone!!! Thanks for reading and sharing this year. More next year.

It's certainly been an interesting year. I'm glad we all survived it. 

Here's my list of goals for 2020:

Give more to charities.

Give more time to charities.

Become a better portrait photographer.

Spend less time spending. 

Spend more time doing.

Always consider: "What if the other guys is right?"

Get some mileage on all the cool cameras I bought in the last last year. 

Celebrate each victory and milestone with appropriate gusto!

Learn what's most meaningful to me in life right now.

Help young people learn the ropes in the creative life. 

Print more beautiful photographs and hang them in more places.

Write more positive stuff here on the blog and worry less about pillorying the idiots that dot the landscape.

Read more novels. Read fewer "how to" books. Read even fewer websites.

Think more about "why" and "what" and a lot less about "how." 

Become a more empathetic portrait photographer.

Love my dog as much as she seems to love me. 

Eat something scary every once in a while. 

Go hear live music that I didn't know I'd like. 

See a Rosini opera in some great opera house somewhere in the world.

Figure out how to migrate the files on my old Mac to my new Mac in less that a week.....

Keep cash in my pocket since the homeless don't accept credit cards.

Learn to tolerate the opinions of others instead of vilifying them and rejecting them.

Speak up when I know what's right. 

Try not to ever have to shoot at 12500 ISO. 

Mat whatever I decide to frame. 

Never tell a young person: This is how we used to do it!

Photograph more ideas and fewer proofs of concept, or proofs of mastery.

Spend more time with Belinda and less time with Tony Northrup, Jared Polin, Ken Rockwell, and that whole crew of lightweights over at DP Review. 

Forget that there are camera specs and remember that you only really need to know six menu settings in order to do fine work.

Remind myself often that the more we pack into our camera bags the fewer good images we'll come back home with.

Finally, it's more important to be a good person than it is to be a good photographer. I think Eugene Richards taught me that this year.

I hope I get to meet more and more VSL readers in person this year. 

Happy New Year! Don't wait, get busy and have more fun. Warmest regards, Kirk