Three years already!

It’s been three years today that I started this blog!

Very few posts at first, then I picked up steam and got into the habit and have published about 260 posts more or less regularly.

I think I have not bored anyone to death until now, so I think I’ll continue.

Here’s one photograph from the very first roll of film I shot after gradually going back to film from digital. It’s from the 4th of January 2013, early morning around 7h30… bloody cold!

My first blogging steps were still 2 years in the future!

My very own decisive moment came when I realised that the Fuji X100 was only a sorry excuse for me not to use film again! Slowly but surely I found my way back to film, through a lot of stupid buying and selling of gear, through a lot of bad decisions and changes of mind.

In the course of those three years I have gathered way over 43.000 views. Small change compared to other blogs and sites, I know,  but I have found a number of trusty followers on whom I can count to give me some useful feedback and advice.

My blog went from 540 views in 2015 to over 10,000 in 2016 and over 31,000 last year. Small change it’s true, but it gives me the feeling that I don’t do this work for nothing, that there are real people out there who like what I write and who appreciate my photos.

I’m not one to chase ‘likes’ and ‘followers’ normally (opted out of Instagram and tuned down Facebook to a minimum background noise), but it gives me a bit of satisfaction.

I also found lots of sites and blogs I visit regularly and leave comments. Thank you for your work too! You inspire me with your writing and your photography. You make me think about the purpose of my photography and make me grow up and get a feel for my capacities and my limitations.

Speaking of limitations, those three years have brought me from the digital Fuji X30 I used for my very first blog post to a life of pure, frugal film photography. Silly, you might say, but I strongly feel that the limits that film imposes on my work make me grow faster and make me do better things. The simpler the cameras I use, the more I like my photos.

Now that I pared down my cameras to just three, the Leica IIIa, the Pentax Spotmatic and the Olympus XA2 I seem to have found the sweet spot of my own photographical journey.

You come from 91 different countries on our small planet, some with lots of visits (Thank you United States, Great Britain, Luxembourg and Germany – in this order…) and some with far less frequent visits (Uruguay, Nigeria, Angola, Jordan, Pakistan and lots of others with the occasional, very welcome visit!).

I want to thank every one of you out there for visiting regularly and I promise (or threaten?) to continue with my posts. I hope you will find some things of interest in my ramblings and I hope to hear from you too!

I wish you all a happy new year, and a lot of success with your photography!

Thank you so much!

Frank