New Adventures in Photography

It’s been an exhausting few months and I feel like I don’t have all that much to show for it, but that is about to change. I’ve been working away behind closed doors on a whole raft of new projects. New Adventures in Photography indeed!

Photography Workshops

The headline news is that my longstanding plans to put on photography workshops in Spain, Morocco and Portugal is coming to the boil. We will be advertising presently, a collection of workshops/tours/holidays, call it what you will, starting in Spring 2025.

Eight Peaks Website

A new website eightpeaks.photography will be launched next month to promote the workshops. and tours separately from this website. I’m busy building that site now.

YouTube

Other things are progressing at speed – my YouTube channel is growing rapidly, and this is very gratifying as it takes a lot of time to produce the videos! I was able to monetise it a couple of months ago and get my first pay check from Google in a few weeks time! This is very welcome indeed and certainly helps put food on the table. Connected to that are the ads that you’ll see on this website. I’ve resisted the urge to have ads until now, but they should be relevant and hopefully will not irritate too much!

Mirrorless Camera Upgrade

I’m also embarking on an upgrade to my cameras – this was precipitated by a sensor fault in my 5d Mk IV that appeared last week. A thin purple line appearing about a fifth of the way across the screen in both video and photographs. I have no choice but to get it fixed and then sell the camera – it’s the first Canon I’ve ever had reason to complain about and paradoxically, the least used.

I’ll be replacing it with the new Canon R5 II closer to Christmas. I plan to keep my lenses and use an adapter to fit them to the new camera. I’m told that there is no discernible loss of quality and I should think not – these lenses cost an arm and a leg!

A Wider Angle

Speaking of lenses, I’ve just located a second hand Canon EF 11-24mm L lens at a reasonable price so the order has gone in. I’m excited about this lens not simply for the fact that it was frighteningly expensive when released and I paid less than half for an ‘as new’ lens, but the lure of a different style of image and all of the learning and adjustment that goes along with that.

A Closer View

Next on the list is a Canon 180mm Macro – that will pretty much complete my setup which marks the end of a two year program shifting the emphasis of my photography away from the studio and into the outdoors.

Storage Upgrades

My desk right now is an unsightly mess of drives, cables, microphones and card readers. Video is way more demanding than Photography and the ongoing battle with drive space is getting me down. So I’ve decided to bite the bullet and modernise.

This means out with the antiquated G-Drive components and in with a bunch of SanDisk Pro equipment including

A Pro-Blade Station with 4 x 4 Tb Blades

This will get rid of the clutter at a stroke. I use Da Vinci Resolve to edit and my plan is to keep the project definitions and rendered videos on one Blade, the Cache and optimised media on a second blade and all of the Photographs and Video footage on another two blades.

The advantage of this is that I can delete the cache and optimised media after every project is completed and there will be no switching of or attaching multiple disks to my computer to juggle footage and no impromptu deleting of old footage to make room on the existing drives.

This setup will be augmented by a SanDisk Pro Dock into which I can plug my exiting card readers and a G-Raid Project 2 configured in RAID 1 to support projects in progress. That will give me assurance that drive failure won’t result in data loss.

A Moment of Reflection

I relaunched my YouTube channel about ten months ago, recognising that a couple of random videos I’d posted had attracted a disproportionate number of views. The penny dropped – nobody could care less what I wanted to show them, what they wanted was answers to issues they needed to resolve. Out of that realisation I niched down to focus on DxO PhotoLab, an RAW editor I use to extractive best possible level of detail and loss of noise from my photographs.

I publish regularly one a week, on Tuesdays at 1pm – this gives the algorithm time to list the video before the wave of viewers signing in during the afternoon and evening. The risk is if nobody watches it in that first couple of hours the video is consigned to YouTube wilderness. YouTube promotes what works, relentlessly.

Once I had passed a thousand subscribers I started to experiment with other types of content, with the one overriding condition that it had to be useful.

As a strategy it seems to have worked. There have been a couple of missteps along the way but viewing figures are very healthy. They say the next and more difficult step is to extend watching time per video – I’m averaging around 40% which is about average as around sixty percent of users dip off before the thirty second mark. I can’t do anything about that, but I can structure the videos in such a way that the remaining 60% of viewers watch the video for longer. Make them more interesting, maybe funnier although my dry seas of humour is a rare thing on YouTube, and more essential.

Anyway, keep an eye out for the new website and if you haven’t already, check out the YouTube channel its been a blast making the videos and I long may it continue!