I’ve been publishing this website in one form or another since back in 2011. That’s fourteen years ago! Over that time, I have changed a lot, the world has changed a lot, and this website has…well, changed a bit, but frankly not enough. The amount of time I’ve spent posting here has consistently dropped off recently, and I realise that at least part of the reason is that I kind of hate this website now. I know that’s quite a strong response, but it’s true. Well, mostly.

I know this may seem like a link bait headline, but in my opinion it’s actually true, but it’s not in the way you might think. I’m not talking about generative AI taking photographer’s jobs or anything like that. It’s the “AI everywhere no matter what” that’s making it harder and harder to get traffic to your website or portfolio. It’s also making content on tips and techniques obsolete. Ever since google started doing its (frequently wrong) AI summaries for search results, traffic to almost all sites has seen a steady decline. It’s not just something I noticed, it was actually on the news the other day.

A little over a year ago, I started an experiment to see if I could partially fund this website and my YouTube channel through Patreon. When I first started it, I’ll admit that I didn’t really know what I was doing, and so for the first few months I floundered. Now that I’ve been doing it for a while, it’s time to re-launch it, with more benefits, more tiers and a better experience.

I’ve been slowly updating and changing the way I handle my portfolio on my collected websites. Previously I had been relying on Photoshelter to host my portfolio, but I’m starting to move away from this for various reasons (more on this in a minute). Because I already have a separate site which is an overview of my Photography in general, I’m adding a proper portfolio to that. I’ll also be updating it with proper galleries for the various genres that I photography regularly. 

Over the past week I've reached two very important milestones, both here on the blog and in my photography journey. First of all, my new e-book on processing X-Trans files in Iridient Developer has become the fastest selling book that I've released to date! Secondly, my humble little blog has passed the million viewer mark!