380 - Shore Acres
Probably one of the coolest beach I've seen in all of Oregon- Shore Acres. And all I got was this shot of an old man. If that's not a perfect metaphor for landscape photography, I don't know what is.
I was in my head almost this entire shot. See, lately I've been having a bit of an existential crisis about the videography portion of my career. Now, I know these blog posts are mainly about the photography, but my plan had always been to monetize the VLOGS of each adventure shoot so I can continue to shoot five days a week at new locations until I hit 10,000 adventures.
If I even had $1,500 a month coming in, I'd be able to make it work.
The thing is, I've shot 200+ vlogs and my views still aren't rising. I'm still averaging under 200 views a vlog, and now it's decreasing for some reason. If I was increasing even just 50 views a month, I'd be happy. But nothing is happening on YouTube. Which almost just feels like a waste of time... Granted, I love doing them, but they take SO MUCH TIME, and they're not building a community. For context, each takes about 2-3 hours of shooting and 3-4 hours of editing. Time I COULD be focusing on studying photography.
It's very strange, because I feel like my vlog creation skillset has only gotten better over the past couple years. But viewership still favors other massive YouTube creators doing the same thing, only 50% less effort.
On a solid week I'm shooting 3-4 vlogs, at tier quality. They post one every couple weeks that looks like it was put together in a few minutes and pull thousands and thousands of views. Maybe I just suck at marketing, but it's pissing me off and I have absolutely no idea what to do.
So I decided I'm going to try a different angle- cinematic travel videos. I decided this week I'd take some time off from vlogging, and focus on trying to make a cinematic video akin to that of Watchtower Of Turkey. Perhaps that could pull some attention to my work.
Except I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing in this realm of videography. I quickly realized it's very different from vlogging in that you need to be filming movement or moving the camera- a lot. The editing is also on a much higher level. Combine all this together and I was in my head the whole shoot. I was trying all these B-Roll angles and basically forgot I should be shooting photography in the first place.
Somehow I barely snagged this one photo of an old man and a tree...
Ironically, this place has some of the craziest sea stacks and cliffs I've ever seen in my life, and I didn't get any of it. Trying to hard to get some B-Roll I could edit cinematically. *Sigh*. It feels like I'm learning to vlog again for the first time. I have a LOT to learn. But I don't want my photography to suffer in the background, because that's the ultimate goal here.
I'll have to figure out how to balance this in the coming weeks... Wish me luck.
I’m on a mission to explore as much as humanely possible.
Want to see my progress? Check out the Adventure Map.
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