Another Birthday!

I recently celebrated the first birthday of my blog and now I'm pleased to say that my YouTube channel is doing the same!

My blog was an easy way for me to journal and share my photography stories, but it soon became apparent to me that creating videos would be a natural extension of this. As with most things though it wasn't as straightforward as I thought it might be, but once I had started I was determined to keep going with it and improve.

My First YouTube Video

My first video, which you can see below, was on drone photography. The story was that I would leave my big Nikon camera behind and see what landscape images I could capture using my DJI Phantom 3. Looking back it's a bit rough around the edges, but as a first VLOG, it was to bad!

My first video on my YouTube channel.

After that video, I created a few others with varying degrees of success. I covered topics such as My Top 5 Landscape Photography Locations in Devon, Creating a Custom Google Map, and How to Use ND Filters. I found the filming hard work. There was a lot to deal with on top of just taking pictures. I had to worry about audio, repeat takes, camera position etc. Then back in post-production, I had to learn how to edit, merge audio to video, export and publish. However, once a video was published there was a great sense of satisfaction.

The Big Adventure

What really keeps me creating new content is the fact that people actually watched my videos. Not in huge numbers, not like a Thomas Heaton, but enough people left positive comments to make me want to carry on. Much in the same way people did with my blog.

So when I decided to spend a few days in Glencoe in March I thought it would be an adventure worth documenting.

My Glencoe adventure video really seemed to hit a mark with people and it gave my subscriber count a significant boost. It was another turning point for my channel and rather than doing videos when I could I started adding video to my regular publishing schedule.

The 5 Minute Adventures

While the longer and more adventurous videos are great to make, they are a significant investment in time and can sometimes take weeks to get done. I wanted to create more videos but with a day job and a family, having the time to create long videos was difficult to find.

After a few people commented on how the liked some of my shorter videos and that enabled them to watch them more readily, I decided to start the 5 Minute Photo Adventure Series. The idea was simple really. I would go to a single location, talk about what I had planned, what I was doing and shoot an image. With just a single location and shot to plan for the production time was much reduced and so I could create more videos.

Here is one of my favourite 5 Minute Photo Adventure videos, but you can watch the entire series by clicking here.

The Nikon D850 Video

I was very excited about the purchase of my Nikon D850 and I was fortunate enough to get one of the day of release. In all the excitement I decided to make a video on my initial experiences. I posted up the video and within 24 hrs it was approaching 10,000 views! This was twice as many views as my Glencoe video ever had. There was an obvious demand for D850 on YouTube and thanks to some good timing I think I had managed to capitalize on that.

The D850 video is by far my most popular video and has given me the biggest subscriber boost.

The Future

I've got a number of videos planned in for the remainder of the year. I'll keep doing my 5 Minute Photo Adventure videos and I have a few bigger adventure videos planned as well. I'm also aiming to do a follow-up drone video and a follow-up video on printing. So there should be something there for all my 1900+ subscribers (never thought I'd get that many!).

So have you checked out my YouTube channel? Do you have a favourite video? Is there a video you'd like to see my make or a location you want me to visit? Let me know in the comments below.