I first set out on creating this blog site in November of 2016. At the time I was starting up my photography business and chose to go with a D-I-Y blog site such as this over a more promotional business website. I made that distinction as I didn’t want my photography to become a hard-sell commercial venture. I wanted it to be an organic experience for myself and for anyone that wanted to engage me in doing some photographic work for them. And I don’t think that will ever change to be honest. So my blog as you see it today has only marginally changed since late 2016.  A few clean ups but that is all. I wanted a space where I could write about my travel experiences in Japan, share my joy of photography, celebrate my home town of Melbourne and everything-in-between. A safe space to document my life after the loss of my wife. A space for larger galleries of my images and a means for people to get in touch with me.

Today I wanted to take a few moments to recognise some milestones that kind of snuck up on me and also to reflect on this site and my connection to it over the past 18 months. I know that this seems like a strange point in time to set as a milestone – but this is not a time based thing. This is about connecting with a broad community of like minded individual, those interested in photography, creativity, travel, managing mental health or those that like what I have to say.  I had not really taken a lot of notice of the statistics and analytics that WordPress provide to its users. Sure they were interesting at a casual glance to see the traffic and where it came from.  They were numbers and something that I probably would have taken greater notice of in my past corporate life.

Well today I am super duper happy to share the most recent ‘numbers’ with you – the people who make this kind of achievement possible. My community. Turns out, that since launching this blog, I have attracted over 13,000 visitors and have had a total of 25,000 views on my site.  And, to top it off, my visitors came from 120 different countries. I just find that phenomenal and whilst I have no delusions that I am a small fish in a big pond when it comes to bloggers, I still fell pretty bloody proud. Regardless I fell that I am making good momentum against targets that I don’t actually have. I am engaging people with my creativity. At least I can make a splash in my own pond.

This blog site gives me a lot of peace and opportunity talk to an imagined audience – which now turns out to be a real audience – and share my journey as a creative individual. My blogging here has also seen me gain some credibility as I am now an author on two other blog sites. One for a mate who is a big Fujifilm user and you can check out his site here.  The second is for the Fuji X Aus community. This group is actually a Facebook group for Australian Fujifilm shooters. It is an awesome community filled with highly talented people. This community has been a huge support for me creatively and I have made some incredible friendships from it. They have a new site that I contribute to on a fairly regular basis and you can check them out here.

Looking forward there is nothing overly exciting to announce – certainly no surprise trip to Japan this year. Although I do plan a weekend away back to Launceston in Tasmania to catch up my friends there again. You may recall I was there a few weeks ago and loved  the opportunity to grab some shots.  Take a look here. At the end of the year I may be heading up to North East Victoria as one of my best mates lives up there and I have been promising for too long to visit. The area is brimming with natural attractions and wine country. I imagine on both of those trips I will capture some worthy content. I am going to keep doing what I love and use this platform to document that.

As for you, dear reader, I wanted to sincerely thank you for your interest, support and motivation that you provide me.  Life is full of challenge and I believe that community is the key to successful survival. I know that my own capacity to survive grief relied on such a broad cast of characters. And in the world we live in now, community is becoming a rarer thing to be a part of and hold on to. So we seek community where we can. In a photography group, an online interest group or through sharing our stories.  We are not so very different after all. Happy shooting.

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