As we start a new year and end a decade, and I wanted to reflect a little on what has happened in terms of this blog, and my photography over the past ten years. I wasn’t really thinking about it that much, but when looking back through my photo archive, I realise that I did accomplish a lot over the past ten years, and a lot has changed.

(Apparently, the decade doesn’t technically begin until 2021, but as most people are calling it the start of a new one, I’m going to consider it too for the purposes of reflection, as its what most people will do.)

Because it’s the beginning of a new year, and a new decade I wanted to take some time to reflect. It’s important every now and then to take stock of what you’re doing creatively and where you’ve come from. With that in mind, I want to look back at what I’ve achieved over the past ten years, and how I got to this point. I want to look back at my successes, my failures and my regrets and try and figure out what I can do going forward. While in a way, this is a personal reflection, it’s also something you may find interesting as a source of inspiration.

Milestones

10 years ago, I had just left a full-time job in the television industry doing motion graphics to work freelance. I wanted to be able to concentrate more on making a go at photography. However, I was also still working as a freelance graphics artist too. The aim was to gradually see if I could transition to working full time as a photographer, in some way or another. I didn’t necessarily want to become a commercial photographer. I had had enough of dealing with clients from my design work and wanted a change. I also wanted to keep blogging and sharing my experiences.

It was a bit haphazard at the time though, and I didn’t really know what I was doing or what I really wanted to focus on. I was mostly writing about Aperture at the time, and that led to my first real breakthrough. I was approached by a publisher to write a book about Aperture. This was my first time working on a full publication, and while it was difficult, it was a great experience. It really helped my writing going forward. Little did I know though that Aperture would be discontinued a few short years later.

I had already started a more general photography blog (this one) by the time I was writing the book. Slowly I made this my primary place to write about photography. I had also started my Streets of Dublin project. This was a photography project which I began as a way to share my photos of Dublin City, which I had been taking for quite some time.

But it was my main photography blog that attracted the most attention. As I learned to be a better writer and a better photographer, I gained more attention and a bigger audience.

My second most significant milestone of the last decade was having one of my photos used in a commercial by Apple. This is one of my proudest moments. The picture itself, which was actually taken while on holiday with my iPhone wasn’t something I had even thought about. Still, they liked it, and it ended up on magazines and billboards. It also ended up in the beautiful book Apple made of the campaign and sent to everyone whose work they used.

The photo that was used in an Apple Commercial - Shot on an iPhone. This is the un-edited version.

I had a few other big commissions over the pasts decade too that I’m really proud of. I had my work used as part of a national campaign by Marks and Spenser, which is a big brand in the UK and Ireland. I was also commissioned to provide images for a book about the bridges of Dublin and this was a great honour too. Another notable achievement was having a book about my travel photography to Vienna featured by Blurb. I also had my photography featured in a national online newspaper.

It was the confluence of all these factors that allowed me to move to writing full time about photography. I’ve now relegate my graphics work to the rare occasion when an old client wants me to do something for them. My photography blog and YouTube channel is my primary focus now. This was a pretty big decision, and I’m still on the fence as to whether it was a good idea or not, but it has been an exciting journey, and it’s one I’m still only at the start of.

Fujifilm & Photo Software

I also bought a Fujifilm camera many years ago when they first came out. I was frustrated by the way Lightroom handled the raw files, so I set about finding ways to work around the issues. My work in this area led to a degree of popularity in the Fuji community, although some resented me for daring to point out that there could possibly be any flaws. I also quickly learned that the Fuji community could be somewhat passionate about the brand.

My work on this continued for many years, and I’ve covered lots of different software. This led me to discover the current direction of my blog finally, and that is that it is mostly about photo software. I’ve moved on from covering Fujifilm specifically and now write about the use of photo software more broadly. However, many of my publications are still Fuji specific.

I’ll be perfectly honest, while I use and like the cameras, I’m not a huge Fuji fan at the expense of other brands. I call out the company for some of its decisions when I don’t agree with them. This has alienated me with some of the leaders in the Fuji community, but I stand by my objectivity. I appreciate that covering Fujifilm has significantly expanded my reach, and it has propelled me to a degree of success that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. However, I have worked to broaden my audience and be a little less brand-specific, although I will probably always cover Fujifilm.

Another significant milestone for me was starting to cover Capture One. While I use Lightroom, and many other applications as well, I find that Capture One is intriguing, as it is an application with a lot of hidden power. Covering this software had brought me back to when I used to write about Aperture. There aren’t as many people covering it as the saturated Lightroom market. I feel that I have a place to teach and inform with my own voice about a topic that others haven’t already covered to death. I also really like the software.

Missteps and the thing I don’t like

The one thing that I’ve found that frustrates me the most about my last few years as a photography blogger is that as I have lost some of my enthusiasm for photography. I’ve felt that my work has suffered as a consequence of covering the more technical aspects of the craft. I find that when I go out to photograph, I’m always in “testing” mode, and I usually end up getting images for a specific need to demonstrate something or other. I find that I’ve lost my vision to an extent, although I’m trying to get it back.

The one biggest technical regrets I have over the last decade is selling my 5D Mark II. At the time I sold it because I wasn’t using it that much, but when I look back over my archives, I had many great photos from that camera. There was something about the look that I really like and miss now that it's gone. It wasn’t a perfect camera by any means, but I wish I hadn’t sold it. I regretted that decision ever since.

One of my favourite photos of the last decade, shot in New York City on a Nikon D700

I’ve also missed out on many opportunities because I was afraid to take them. There were things I was asked to do that I didn’t directly have the skills to do. But rather than adopting the “fake it till you make it approach, I was too afraid to take the opportunities. In some of these cases, I was kicking myself after the fact, but it’s all part of the learning process, I suppose.

The other thing that I’ve really struggled with is the negativity in the photography community. Dealing with negative comments is part of the deal you make for putting your stuff out there. I’ve been blogging for a long time, so this is nothing new to me. I used to write about the Mac and Apple, and there was some considerable, let's call them “expressions of opinion” in that community. So I’m used to dealing with negative comments. But the level of acrimony in the online photography community is a whole other level.

There has been a lot of discussions lately about the photography community online being toxic, and I agree entirely with that assessment. It’s also getting a lot worse. People seem to be becoming more and more entrenched in their opinions. It often seems to be difficult for people to accept that there can be other points of view and that those opinions aren’t necessarily conflicting with theirs. People think that their way of photography and their likes and views are the only way things are done, even if their experience is a fringe one. They can’t accept when someone’s experience is different. And often, instead of responding with the reasoned discussion, they react with hate. It’s really quite shocking to me sometimes the things that people get upset over, or angry about. It's not just comments either. Its blog posts, youtube channels, and photographers on social media, all staking out their little turf and doing their best to tear others down. It’s really disheartening, especially when it's relentless.

I also think the internet has had an entropic effect on photography education. There are a lot of people getting their information about photography from people who don’t know what they’re doing themselves. This is either on YouTube or crowdsourced blogs like PetaPixel or Digital Photography School. These well-known sources often contain some shocking attempts to teach people things that are just plain wrong, because the person teaching learned the same way. And much of this isn’t a matter of opinion, it’s just plain wrong. It's become about who is more convincing now than facts. Of course, this phenomenon isn’t only limited to photography.

This is having a very real-world effect on photography. I’ve seen books published with photographs featuring some serious and easily fixable technical errors. These are mistakes that no one who has properly learned photography would make, or allow to be printed in such a fashion. This has included product shots out of focus, severe chromatic aberration, significant exposure errors, and so on. The “technical details aren’t important” crowd seem to have succeeded in lowering the quality of the art form so kudos to them for spreading their ignorance so effectively. There’s so much information and misinformation out there that it all kind of cancels each other out now. We’re left with a sea of opinions. I would hate to be trying to learn photography from scratch now.

And yet, when you try to teach things and help people, you get attacked for being “too technical” or get comments like “real photographers don’t care about ...”. This is from the same segment of the community who never learned and thinks that learning proper skills somehow infringes on their artistic freedom. It’s all this that has me questioning whether it’s something I want to continue doing at times, because the level of hate is growing exponentially, and it’s depressing.

But I don’t want to give up just yet. I will continue to try and do my bit for common sense and reason, and at the end of the day, it's still a personal expression, so I will try and do my part in it. I will continue to try and be honest and call things as I see them, despite the criticism from the more passionate that I might incite.

Another one of my favourite photos from the past 10 years.

What keeps me going

I didn’t mean for this to take a sour note, but it wouldn’t be an accurate reflection without looking at both the good and bad. I don’t want to end on that sour note though, so I wanted to point out the thing that I like the most about being a blogger, and why I still do it. I wrote about this on my Christmas post for Patreon, and I wanted to share it here too.

You see, one of the advantages of doing what I do, and one of the things that I love about it is that I get to connect with people all over the world. I have readers and customers from pretty much every country in the world, and the one thing that really strikes home is that people everywhere, despite the acrimony online, are basically good. Sure there are idiots, but there are idiots everywhere, and that's the beauty of it. The creative community is the same all over the world.

When I get depressed from seeing racism and xenophobia on the news, I remember all the people from all over the world that I’ve interacted with because of my blog. It gives me hope to know that art and culture unite us all. Art and culture are such powerful forces and getting to be part of that and despite some of what goes on online, is such a gift, and I'm genuinely grateful for it. And I'm thankful for all of my readers and supporters.

New Directions.

Last year, I made a series of New Years photography resolutions. They never really panned out (some for personal reasons - I was sick a lot), so this year, instead of creating a series of unattainable goals, I want to be a little more aspirational. With that in mind, I am going to set "directions" rather than specific goals.

Direction 1: Get My Groove Back

The first is to get my groove back and return to focusing on my photography. I plan to put more effort into my Streets of Dublin project, and my other photography. I want to try and recover some of the love I have lost and shoot just for the art rather than for testing or to cover something in a blog. This is my number one goal. How will I achieve this? No idea yet, but I’ll let you know if I figure it out!

Direction 2: Combine my skills

I want to find a way to combine my graphics, animation video and photography skills to create something unique. I already sort of doing this through YouTube, but I want to find a way to make it more commercially viable in some way. Again, this is just a direction I want to take rather than a specific goal, but its something I really want to do.

Direction 3: Be better organised

I have thousands of photos in my collection, none of which are particularly well organised. I’ve been trying for years to get on top of this problem, but its still a big issue for me. I’ve started afresh at tackling this, and this time I have help, so I might actually do it.

This goes for blogging and vlogging too. I want to be more consistent with my content, and the delivery of it, and this means better planning. It’s something I’ve been working on over the Christmas period, and I hope it will start having a visible effect soon.

Direction 4: Self Care

Having binge-watched all four and a half seasons of Queer Eye on Netflix over the Christmas holidays, I realise that the other thing I really want to do is to start caring for myself a little better. I get entirely swept up in this blog and community sometimes, and the stress has led me to be quite ill over the past few years. At times I’ve really struggled, physically and mentally, with my own limitations and dealing with the negativity. With that in mind, I want to focus more on looking after myself, both physically and mentally, and so I will have a renewed focus on self-care. I am also considering covering “creative mental health” or mental health for creatives on my blog or youtube channel at some point soon too.

Conclusion

The point of taking this time to reflect is both for you, the reader, to see where I am but also for me to take stock. I want to keep writing and to deliver useful content to my readers. With the start of a new decade, it's a good time to reboot and take a fresh look at where I’ve come from, and where I’m going. I hope the next months and years that this humble little site will continue to be a useful resource for people and I can continue to inform and inspire people.

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