This week I announced the start of a new podcast / visual essay series. The first episode you can watch on YouTube below.
if you also prefer to listen to audio-only podcasts, then it is also available on Spotify and Apple’s Podcast platform.
A bit of back story: those that have been following me since before 2010 may know that I used to publish a visual essay on Apple’s iTune service. The videos were very popular. Short in length - approximately five minutes long, I enjoyed using a slideshow of images I’d made on a recent trip somewhere, and collecting thoughts to put to some ambient background I would also compose (I’ve been writing music since I was 12).
I abandoned the podcast around 2012. It was simply because it took me a while to find new material. I had only really been working professionally since 2009, and I had only recently (by 2010) started to incorporate foreign locations into my photographic yearly schedule. In short: I did not have enough material to keep up a regular podcast series.
It had never been put together in the first place to be published on a weekly basis. For the uninitiated, it takes a whopping amount of time to go away, make images, work on them, write a script, record your voice, edit the presentation. Some seemed to expect this would be a weekly occurrence and I even got marked down (?!?!?!?) for not publishing regularly :-) It was free! And yet I still got marked down because it was not a regular occurrence.
I mention this, because I wish to point out that the new podcast series at present has a lot of material shot over the past decade to utilise for the source of the episodes. I’ve recorded quite a few episodes so far, which will keep the podcast busy for six months if I publish two episodes a month. But I am anticipating that due to work commitments else where (running a workshop and tour business) that it may become sporadic.
Besides, I’d prefer to publish only when I feel I have something to say :-)
Right now, I do not wish to put pressure on this. I think many YouTube content providers abandon their channel because it has turned into a chore. Things become a chore when you have set yourself a target to publish every few weeks. It becomes a race for new material and I think the content suffers, and also, whomever is creating the content gets disenchanted after a while.
At the moment, I have a lot of material to use. A decade’s worth of images. Over a decade’s worth of writing on this blog to expand upon. I’ve enjoyed writing the blog, but I do feel that sometimes the nuance is missing in my writing that can be conveyed better in audio and visual formats.
So, I see this as a two year project at the moment. I intend to produce regular content for the first year, and we will see after that. Perhaps it’s just a project in it’s own right, and as with all projects, it will have a start, a middle and an end.
I hope you enjoy the ride with me. Let’s see where this will go.