The world has changed a lot since I first started my blogging and mentoring on photography. And I’ve changed a lot too. I’ve learned a great deal over the last few decades of writing and teaching. Even the craft itself has changed around me. We have better lenses that are lighter and brighter. We have better sensors that deliver more dynamic range and less noise. And better software on our laptops that make editing faster and slightly less arduous.
But the internet has changed too.
I used to spend days crafting an article for my website, and then share that to a few thousand followers on Facebook. I’d get comments from my readers almost every day, which would help me understand if I was on the right track or if I might have missed the mark entirely. Feedback is important. Every so often someone would email their thoughts directly, or a just drop me thank you. Those were good old days.
The overlap between photographers who revel in the visual medium with those who enjoy reading pages and pages of a blog, was always somewhat tentative. Not everyone has time or the inclination to read stuff, even if they manage to find it amongst the sea of “SEO generated content” that consumed the internet. After all, we are the kind of people who are drawn to expressing ourselves through pictures, instead of words.
I started making my YouTube videos about two years ago. It’s not a natural space for me. I prefer being behind the camera than in front of it. But YouTube does provide a great platform to share your photos. In many ways the YouTube experience is way better than a website. You can talk through an image, and enjoy the experience in full-screen without the browser. And while it demands immense effort to produce a single video, something in the order of 8-24hrs depending on the format, the total watch time for even a single video can sometimes be measured in the thousands of hours. When that happens, it’s definitely a good result.
But I still struggled to find my place amongst the chaos of YouTube. Their algorithm is utterly brutal, and it is very much geared in favour of shouty rants rather than gentle interludes. Most of my videos do not garner 5,000 hours of views, and it felt like the larger my subscriber base grew the fewer people actually see my posts. It’s hard to keep putting in the effort when it feels like nobody is watching.
I took a little break at the start of this year, mainly because I was working on other things. I needed that time-out anyway, to rethink where my energy is better spent. A month ago I came back to focus on my relationship with YouTube once more, and I am hopeful that this time I might have found myself a cosy little corner where I belong. I still hope to find the energy to make a few “how to” videos again, but in the meantime I am enjoying just having a conversation.
Where I have landed in this process is not so much shouting at an audience, but having a bit of a natter with them. A chat with friends is far more pleasant for me than giving a lecture to strangers.
I’ve never been confident as a public speaker, and with good reason. I have a life-long speech impediment which I work hard to keep on top of. Every single day I have to work at it. At any moment I might slip up and fall back into a blocked speech pattern; which is probably very confusing and uncomfortable for those around me, but dreaded and disappointing for me personally. It’s like being five years old again. I have to edit my videos very hard to remove all the speech blocks.
The process of making these videos over the past two years has also helped me to simply speak better though. It’s rewiring my brain a little bit. The trick to learning to overcome speech impediments is finding a different pathway in the brain to connect thoughts to speech. For me, responding to a specific question that draws on my existing knowledge and skill often allows my brain to find a pathway that is a little more fluent.
But where do the questions come from in the fist place?
This was an important ingredient to my YouTube reboot this year, and I found those questions in my social media community. I’m not talking about IG or Facebook though. Not even close. Zuckerberg essentially holds my audience to ransom and sends me regular demands for money if I want any of my followers to actually see what I’m up to. I prefer to spend my time in the Fediverse, which is the decentralised equivalent of social media. And that’s where I’ve met a lot of interesting people, who pose a lot of interesting questions.
So I started posting YouTube videos where I simply talk about a topic that turned up on Mastodon. I simply turn on the camera and share my thoughts in the moment. No script. No planning. No fancy B-roll. Just sharing my thoughts. I shut the blinds in the office, turn on the key-light and start recording. Minimum friction is the goal. I don’t want to spend an hour trying to fine tune a recording setup each time I have a thought – the inspiration is long gone by then. I keep it simple, keep it sustainable.
I am drawing on two years of experience of course. Two years of making mistakes. All those videos I made that nobody watched have proved useful in this regard. Now I can get rolling with minimal fuss, and with a lot less drama I can produce a ten minute video that will also be watched by nobody. Perfection!
Every time I share a video on my social media I end up with new comments and discussion, which inspires the next video. In truth I could be making a video every day. I have plenty to talk about. Everyday seems like too much though. I have other things I gotta do after all, like make money and help my photography clients. I found myself having to force myself to slow down a little. Even every second day is probably too much. But once a week seems not enough.
After a couple of weeks of making these vlogging style videos I realised something else, I realised that the only difference between my vlogs and a podcast was how you download them. Back in 2019 I started a podcast and it didn’t last long. It was hard work, and I never found the right co-host to make things move forward. But it’s 2025, and I’m sharing my thoughts in 10 minute parcels every other day… and I’ve accidentally made a podcast!
I spent a few days tinkering with my website and reconnecting a bunch of Apple and Spotify accounts, and now these YouTube offerings are also appearing in your podcast app of choice. You don’t have to watch my ugly mug while talking, you can listen to the podcast version instead. Definitely not what I had on my dance card for 2025, but it seemed silly not to complete the circle once I had done all the hard work to make the YouTube vlogs sustainable and enjoyable.
So please join me for a chat whenever you feel like. Jump onto the podcasts, or hop onto YouTube, or if you’re a Fediverse fan you can also enjoy these videos on PeerTube where there is no advertising to distract from the chat. FYI, I make a point to disable the “mid-video adverts” in YouTube whenever I upload. I know this means the algorithm will punish me even harder, but I also feel strongly that ads dropped into the middle of a short video are just evil. It ruins the experience.
I’ll never get rich off my YouTube channel, I understand that. Perhaps things might be different if I was younger, skinnier, prettier, extroverted... or all of the above. But I do want to grow a community. I want to be engaged with people who find these discussions as interesting as I do. For now that seems to be a few hundred people a week. With a little luck YouTube will find a few more like-minded souls. Because my favourite thing about photography is the conversation. Each photograph is not just a moment in time, but the nucleation of a much bigger discussion. Every photo exists in the context of a conversation. The photo you take today may take on a very different meaning 25 years later, when the world has changed even though your photo hasn’t.
So please join the conversation!
– Ewen
* youtube.com/@ewenbell
* ewenbell.com/podcast
* social.ewenbell.com/ewen
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