It’s our first year with a garden at the new house, and now tomatoes, peppers, and even strawberries are ripe and ready to pick.
This gave me a chance to try out my new Canon EF-M 28mm f/3.5 macro – part of my summer project to round out my Canon M system. This lens also gives me a 40mm field of view (my favorite!) on the APS-C sensor.
Colors here, colors there – a rainbow everywhere.
School’s almost in session, summer is sliding into fall, so I’m getting up and close to the things that grow while I still can.
Travel for work is the best, especially when you get to explore a new place.
In this case, I traveled to Burlington, Ontario, for a sales meeting and stayed on the Lake Ontario shore, just south of Toronto.
It gave me a good excuse to test my new-ish Canon M200 and 15-45mm kit lens in the morning and late afternoon while walking around downtown Burlington.
From 2018 to now, we head up to Door County, Wisconsin, for our annual family summer vacation. With no better idea this year, we made our way back in July.
Some familiar sites, some brand new. Just in time for cherry season. And beautiful weather along Lake Michigan and Green Bay. Lucky us.
Greens and blues, reds and browns. Maritime cities and rural countryside. Beach days and quick day trips.
Just this week, I logged into Tumblr to see where it was. The algorithm heard me and presented Yvonne’s video, as if 2014 was calling us all back.
I loved Tumblr. It was a great mix of social and blogging. It was fun, easy to use, easy to post, and for a beginner photographer like me, offered tons of ideas and inspiration as I grew in my craft. Ultimately, I gave it up because of its walled-garden nature, but using the platform was a hoot. I still miss it.
Now, it’s a ghost town – at least the blogs I followed have mostly shut down or moved on.
Yvonne’s video is a great look back at the height of Tumblr-mania and what it inspired in all of us who were there at the time.
Lately, I’ve stumbled on the YouTube photography community, and YouTube channels have, in my eyes, taken over the role of photo blogs.
Gear? Lots of that. How-to videos? There are plenty of those. My favorites include discussions of craft, process, and projects. I want to know more about the work, not necessarily about what camera was used (though I do enjoy some gear-related videos) or a step-by-step instructional video. It’s the same stuff I would want to read on a photo blog, but now the good stuff seems to be on YouTube.
With a YouTube channel, we can hear from the artist directly, see their work, and learn about the behind-the-scenes process that often goes into projects. You can also hear from the photographer directly—which is still possible on a blog, but video makes it a little more personal. And thanks to the Almighty Algorithm™, it’s easy to click from one video to the next and easily find other channels.
A few of my favorites include:
James Popsys – good thoughts on tips, strategy, and composition from a landscape photographer
Teo Crawford – another film photographer in Austria who dabbles in digital (video above)
Tom Calton – more gear-based, especially around smaller budget cameras
Zeek – the king of using the Canon EOS M for cinema shooting
Sean Tucker – good philosophy of photography channel
I’m not switching to YouTube any time soon, and this blog isn’t going anywhere. I like writing and reading. But video is a modern, attractive approach to sharing photography insights that bring a little bit extra to the conversation.
