2018 has been a pretty awesome year all in all. I have now a bit of a tradition of writing a blog post that wraps up my year of photography and here is my 2018 offering. If you are curious you can find 2017 and 2016 posts by following the hyperlinks. Anyway, I have tried to break down 2018 into a series of compilations and key points. Thanks for reading, and I look forward to working with you in 2019!!!!
1) Photography
Through 2018 I took a much more restrained attitude to taking photos, trying to focus on quality over quantity. I tried as much as possible to focus on composition, and capturing images with unique lighting situations. I am so pleased with the little grid of just 9 images below, and also comparing my work with previous years. Improving and being critical of your own work is a huge part of developing as a photographer!
2) Teaching
I love teaching photography, mostly because I genuinely enjoy meeting new people and being able to chat about cameras for 2+ hours. This year was my first full year teaching interdependently rather than through an established school. Its more difficult for sure due to having to independently advertise and promote the classes but far more worth it for the independence. I have had a chance to work with a lot of people and I already have a bunch of lessons booked in for 2019 which I am looking forward to. I'm extremely proud of my 5 star rating on google and feel incredibly happy that my students have enjoyed the lessons as much as I have enjoyed teaching them.
3) Social Media
Instagram and Facebook are really powerful tools for small business and freelancers. Its amazing now that with your phone you can post content that can be seen by people around the world. Below is an automatically generated summary of my top photos and total likes from 2018. Its interesting to see which images ended up being the most popular in the end, the people of instagram seem to really like images of Iceland apparently!
4) Stock Photography
I started a little project around mid way through 2018, selling microstock photography through websites like Getty, Shutterstock and Adobe. I still don't know if all the hours spent tagging and uploading were very worth it though. Landscapes are my speciality area, but probably the most competitive image type on these websites so not a huge amount of sales were made. The most popular images I have seem to be of some of the difficult to access areas of Australia that I have photos from where I have a bit of a unique product. I managed to make around 40GBP over a couple of months which is still better than nothing. I don't know at this stage if I will continue uploading images, but it was an interesting experiment.
5) My Favourite Photo from 2018
This I think was an easy one. I have wanted to travel to Switzerland to see the Matterhorn for as long as I can remember, and this year I was able to do it on my honeymoon no less. On top of all of that I managed to capture the magical town of Zermatt at night with the snow covered peak of the Matterhorn in the background. Easily my top photo of 2018!
