I’ve been very busy this past week, and so once again I’ve been somewhat bad about posting on the blog. I have been buried in design work with a tight deadline and so unfortunately the tutorials and so on have had to take a back seat. I have so much photography stuff to share too, and it’s just been building up in my to-do list, so I hope you can forgive the short absence. Google’s algorithm, however, will not. (Not that it even matters anymore with AI running the show there now)

I actually hate going a week without posting anything, but I was just so busy that I didn’t get a chance to even think about what to write. I’ve actually been thinking about ways to shake up my photography content lately, and I had some plans in formation for a big push next year, but between work and other life stuff, it’s been a slow process. In the meantime, I wanted to share a couple of things that I have been working on in the background and a few other ideas that have been percolating.

Where has the time gone?

This is so weird, but I genuinely thought that the last one of these posts that I wrote as last month, and I just went looking for it on my website, and realised that it was back in June. What the heck? It’s been a very bizarre summer and I can’t believe it’s nearly Halloween. Ughhh….

Anyway….

New Lightroom Presets

I actually have two new Lightroom preset packs ready to go, and all I have to do for these is create the support content. One is another “film like” pack and the other is a sequel to my old, now discontinued Alpine pack. This will be designed for landscape photography primarily, and is inspired by the various places that I’ve visited over the past year. Once I’ve finished my current client work, I will get to making these available on my store.

They’re actually nearly done, so it’s not a huge amount of work to get these out.

Famous last words.

A red Autumn Leaf fallen on the Ground — Red Autumn Leaf

I’m rewriting my Lightroom Fuji Guide. Finally. Again.

I’ve finally, after multiple false starts, begun re-writing my long neglected Lightroom fuji guide. I’ve actually discontinued the old one because it was so out of date, and I had a choice to either let it go, or create a new one. I've had a few attempts at this over the recent few years, and I’ve made comments before about starting a re-write before. However, between Adobe changing some fundamental aspects of Lightroom, and Fuji coming out with new models, I've been putting it off and having to restart again and again.

But this time, I’ve actually already started writing, and it’s fully laid out and actually in-progress. I would rather not promise a timeline, and it’s probably still a few months away, but it is more or less a complete re-write of the old one. There is some content retained, and some of my relevant blog posts have been repurposed for it, but the majority of it is new.

Bringing back my Patreon and Newsletter

I’m also considering bringing back my Patreon page and email newsletter. If I do, they will be a bit different from before. I think it’s important to go back to ways of reaching people, where the audience gets to choose what to follow, rather than hoping to coax the algorithm into sharing your content. I’ll talk more on this later, but one thing I’m going to do with Patreon is make it much simpler than before. I will have only one tier and I will be providing behind the scenes content and one off stuff more than anything else. I had made this much too complicated before.

I actually miss it because it was a great way to connect with people, and there was a good sense of community there. I had hoped some of that could be replicated on Facebook with Facebook Groups, but boy was I wrong about that. I’m to the point now where I barely use Facebook anymore, and I am considering deleting my account there.

I’m still trying to figure out how best to do the newsletter. I really just want it to offer people a way to subscribe via email. I had used Mail Chimp before, but that was actually a bit of a pain to manage, and it gets expensive. I’ll probably go with Substack, as it’s free and has a number of useful features, although it’s more suitable as a dedicated separate newsletter than a way for people to subscribe. I could do that with Squarespace’s own mail system, but that gets complicated too, and I’m not 100% sure how compliant it is with GDPR rules on emails. Anyway - it’s a problem to solve another day, but if anyone has any suggestions as to a good platform for this, I would be grateful for any suggestions.

And other things…

That's pretty much it for now. My pile of posts to write for my photo journal blog continues to grow, and now I have about 8 photo essays that I need to follow up with, including trips to Scotland and Germany and the UK. Not to mention numerous shoots in Ireland.

Get it together, Thomas.

Actually, since I did write the last of these posts, I have updated my portfolio site to the latest version of Squarespace, and it has offered me a new way to share photos. So hopefully, I can do that without the long-winded way I’m currently doing it. Anyway, stay tuned on that one as once I get this current bout of client work finished, I’ll be back to getting through my to-do list. Along with my presets, and book.

And I haven’t even mentioned YouTube. But that's for another day.

Anyway, if you have any ideas as to what you’d like to see from this blog, tutorials you think might be interesting and so on, please let me know. I share these kinds of posts to keep you, the community informed, but also to connect with you and get feedback, so let me have it in the comments below.