Taking a Break

I’ll be honest with you: I’m a bit worn out.  Ok, I’m quite exhausted.  My life is a constant go-go-go-go-go, and something has to give.  I love sharing my work, but I feel like I’ve been taking too much on lately, so I have decided to take a much-needed break. You might have suspected this was coming after my post last week.  The fact of the matter is I’m so busy producing new posts that I’m not spending enough time actually out in the world doing what I do best – photographing!  I also don’t get much of a chance to promote and fine-tune the content I’ve already created, and that’s not very fair to you – my readers.  Therefore, I’m going to take a bit of a breather so I can replenish my energy to share better posts. I have several plans, and I’m excited about all of them.

A site redesign

First, I want to do a complete overhaul of my site.  I feel it’s gotten a bit bogged down, and I want to clean it up with a fresh new look.  I want to provide the best experience for my visitors, and some things about my webpage feel a tad sloppy And I want to refocus it on the elements that are most important to me. …which means I have to figure out what those are. As you know by now, I love to shoot any and everything, but I understand it can be a bit jarring if someone comes to my site to see more bear photos and they stumble upon Kumoricon images instead.  I’ve attempted to segregate my interests, but I think I can do this more effectively with a bit of a site redesign. This of course also takes time.  Clearing my weekly schedule a bit will allow me to clean some of this up.

New experimentation

I want to experiment more.  Ironically contrary to what I just said, I have so many dream projects I yearn to tease out.  I just haven’t felt the freedom to do so.  Without a weekly deadline hanging over me, I can set aside time to do this. I was excited to have realized my fun scatter photos idea, and I want to do more.  I still don’t feel like I’ve quite identified my true niche in this industry (so don’t feel bad if you don’t know yours, either), and toying with a few different ideas should hopefully help me suss that out. To give you a bit of a taste, here are just a few things on my “experiment wish list”:

• Infrared photography
• More moonscapes
• Light painting
• Fun post-processing experimentation
• Some messy studio playtime (that’s all I’ll say about this one for now – you’ll have to stay tuned for more!)

Stock photography

I’ve also only casually worked on building my stock photography offerings.  I really want to ramp that up so I can better support my addiction passion.  I’ve been sadly neglecting this piece, and I’m not happy about that. If you are in need of any stock landscape or wildlife images, I encourage you to support an artist directly, either here on my website, or on Picfair (a stock site that actually pays photographers more than $0.25 per photo).  You are also encouraged to share either link with your friends or on your social media of choice.  I appreciate your support!

What’s next

So I’m going to take a little vacation from blogging.  It is now November, so I am going to use the cozy holiday season to make my site as awesome as it can be, with a fresh launch after the new year.  I’ll take a bit of time for myself and to work under the hood for some much-needed maintenance. But I won’t completely abandon you!  Instead, I want to bring back my Silent Sunday, though I think I’ll move it to Wordless Wednesday to be more consistent with my past posting schedule.  This way, I can continue to share images with you, without the added overhead of a full blog post. And if I feel a bit lonely, I might throw a real post in here and there. In the meantime, please come find me on social media!  I’ll be posting a lot more regularly there, and you can keep up with any fun new projects I’m working on between site cleanup.  I just got back from this year’s Kumoricon (my home anime convention), and I created a shiny new events account on Instagram.  You can still find fun wildlife photos on my primary account, but as I process images from this weekend, I’ll be sharing a lot on the new one.  If you also like events photography, I welcome you to follow me on that account as well, right here!

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Thank you all for hanging with me here, for reading about my adventures, and for sharing your kind words on my photography.  I look forward to what the new year will bring!

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