If you follow my YouTube channel you may have seen that I have decided to make some big changes there, switching from a channel that is entirely focused on videos about photography to something much more broad covering all my interests. I’ve addressed that briefly on the channel but I thought this would be a good space to go into more details for anyone who might be interested.

Why branch out?

Obviously the first question is, why? And I guess the most brief and honest answer is just that I lost interest in making videos about photography.

I started the channel in 2021 when I was really interested in expanding my photography hobby. I was living with my parents in a rural area, and we were really still in “COVID times”, which meant there were limited things to do in my spare time. With those combined, it made sense to make the types of videos that I did, a combination of landscape photography and educational photography content, which often took a lot of research and planning.

At the time I was also committed to making one video a week, and just barely had space in my schedule to keep up with that in addition to my full time job and other obligations of life.

Now, things are a bit different. The COVID crisis is over and I live in the city where there are tons of things to do. At some point I stopped trying to make a video every week, in order to focus on being creative in my videos, but found that most of my video ideas in the photography-education space didn’t really lend themselves to the level of creativity I wanted to put forth. Plus, those videos often require considerable research and planning, taking hours my time without particularly being a creative outlet.

Perhaps some people maintain their excitement about one thing forever, but I certainly don’t. Not to say I necessarily abandon my hobbies, but my I have a diverse range of interests and love trying new things, so what I’m most passionate about is often something I’ve newly discovered and am trying to learn and master. So in the time left by stepping away from my photography-education videos I've found new interests outside of photography that I'm excited about and would love to share.

You’ve likely noticed that there haven’t been a lot of videos on my channel for the past couple years, and that’s why. I mentioned previously that I haven't always had time to release a weekly video, but that's not the full story. To be honest I was unmotivated to produce content because while I wanted to make videos, but I didn’t feel like making videos that fit within the topic of the channel.

Are you still doing photography?

Of course! I’ve been taking photos (albeit not always very good ones) for almost my entire life, and I don’t anticipate ever stopping. Most of my photos recently have been of my other interests, like my plants or coffees I’ve made.  A few months ago I photographed a friend’s wedding, which was a first for me, and of course there are hundreds of pictures of my cat. I’ve also made a few family videos just for fun, and a couple things for my TikTok.

The real difference is that the photos and videos I’ve taken have been about my other interests, rather than about themselves, that is, I’ve been focused on doing photography rather than talking about doing photography.

And that is the change I’m making to my channel. I want to focus on actually practicing creativity in photos and videos, not just talking about it, because that’s what I really enjoy.

This sounds a bit selfish, shouldn’t you serve the audience more to be successful?

Yep. But, it’s my channel. Sorry.

Sarcasm aside, yes, I fully recognize that this is not the most successful strategy to take on YouTube and that there are a lot of subscribers who may not be interested in my new content and may unsubscribe. I considered making a new channel for other topics, to keep my current channel photography focused in other to better cater to those subscribers, but that comes with a few inconveniences for me: having to switch accounts to post content and having to build a new following from scratch.

If I look at my YouTube analytics, I can see that videos which brought the most subscribers were my very specific how-to videos, such as a video where I walk through every single button on the Nikon Z6ii and explain what it does. Therefore, if I were to aim for YouTube success, the numbers say I should lean into making those types of videos as often as possible. Obviously it’s a risk, but if I cancelled my other plans, stayed home a lot more, and made camera specific how-to videos once or twice a week it’s possible I could develop a large following and start to actually make some money from YouTube.

There are, though, two reasons why that doesn’t entice me.

First of all, I really don’t need fame and financial success on YouTube. I’d love to grow my audience and feel like there are people appreciating my work, and I’d love a bit of income to support my hobbies, but I don’t need either of those things.

In terms of fame, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care about getting validation from viewers that my videos were good. I love to see someone has liked or commented “great video.” But YouTube isn’t my sole source of validation in life, either. That would be pretty sad if it was. Thanks in part to a lot of therapy, I have a lot of self confidence and am fine without that validation. Beyond that, there are a lot of people in my life who I know will support me and my interests, so I don’t need that from strangers on the internet. In fact, it means a lot more to me if someone I’m close to tells me they enjoyed the video than if a hundred people click the like button. The people close to me, too, are mostly not photographers, and while they’ve been very supportive, the specific videos that have performed really well understandably don’t interest them.

In terms of financial success, again, it would be great if YouTube helped to pay for my hobbies. That was part of the reason I started the channel, because for years photography had been purely a cost, so I figured that could be an opportunity to get a little back from it. At the moment I haven’t reached the watch hour threshold to monetize the channel, and if I do reach that I won’t start to make any significant amount of money until I have a lot more subscribers. While I’ve had the channel I’ve bought a lot of new camera gear too, some of which I’d probably have bought for myself anyway and some of which is for the channel, but to total all of it the channel is probably five or six thousand dollars in the hole. So sure, if it started to pay for itself that would be amazing, I think everyone probably envies the influencers who seem to make a living just by having fun. But, again, do I actually need that? Just a couple years before starting on YouTube I started my career as a software developer, and I think most people would agree that I'm quite successful in that. I have a stable job with a six-figure salary, no dependents, and live in an area with a relatively low cost of living. So I’m not relying on YouTube to become my career, and I can still afford to pay for my hobbies on my own.

The second reason I don't want to aim for YouTube success by making more of those videos that have been the most successful is that those weren’t typically the videos that I enjoyed making. In fact, perhaps ironically, some of them were videos I made when I didn’t have any “better” ideas; when I was feeling uninspired. That video I mentioned, where I walk through the Z6ii’s buttons, has performed very well, but it really wasn’t creative or fun to make, in fact, it was quite boring to make. So if I wanted to follow the conventional wisdom for YouTube success, I’d need to focus on making the content that I was never really that interested in making in the first place. Certainly I could do that, but that would make my YouTube channel work rather than a creative outlet.

Perhaps, then, this is a crossroads for my channel. Is it a hobby or a career?  I’ve chosen hobby. I have no need to leave the stability of my full-time job which I enjoy and am successful at, and no desire to take free time from my interests, relaxation, or girlfriend in order to make videos that feel like a chore to produce. I have a career that I enjoy, I'm not seeking another one with more potential downsides.

So why not start a new channel?

I’ve put a lot of thought into this.

For me, keeping the same channel means likely losing some subscribers who aren't interested in the new content, while starting a new channel means creating a new account and starting fresh at 0 subscribers, and subscribers of each of those might not necessarily see my other content which could be of interest to them.

For viewers, keeping the same channel means they could be bothered by videos in their feed that might not interest them, and might want to unsubscribe as a result, while starting a new channel would be anyone who was interested would need to go subscribe again and for those who weren't the current channel would just sit there dormant like it is now, rarely being posted to.

What it really came down to is this: the channel in its current form is essentially dead. I’m posting to it very occasionally and I have no real intentions to go back to making the very niche content that was more successful unless at some point it sounds fun to me. So I’m not providing any value to those subscribers who want that content, and without me actively growing that channel to get monetization and ad views, they’re not providing any value to me either.

If I drop a video about my houseplants and a lot of people unsubscribe, that’s kind of fine. My hope is that some of those people will also be interested in houseplants, or coffee, or the cinematic and artistic videos I want to make about those things, and will enjoy sticking around, which could provide some small advantage over starting fresh. But if not it’s easy for people to unsubscribe and I won’t be offended, so neither of us are really out anything.

What will new videos be about?

Well, there’s a good chance of more photography related content, since I’m going to keep taking photos and shooting videos. Beyond that, as I hinted above, some definite topics are houseplants and coffees, as well as product reviews beyond just photography. I enjoy buying new things as I build my life and love something that has great design or helps create a certain lifestyle, so I want to share that.

I’m not sure what else I might post since I’m going to post whatever I’m excited about, but I know that will create much more authentic videos, because it’s a lot easier for me to naturally engage with a topic I’m currently passionate about.

As far as the style, I want to try to make the videos really artistic whenever I can, because that’s what I enjoy about making videos, and also something I love when I’m watching videos. For example, coming soon is a video about an espresso maker I got recently, and I don’t plan on that being a dry talking-head review, especially since I’m a beginner to making espresso. Instead I’m in the process of creating cinematic shots of the unboxing and espresso brewing experience, mixed in with some of my thoughts, to create something much more focused on art and lifestyle than necessarily a particular product.

The best example I can think of from channels I follow would be Becki and Chris, who have always been people I love to watch and an inspiration to me. Their videos include a lot of photography and videography education, but they also include travel, DIY, and home improvement. They’re often very artistic, extremely high quality, and follow the journey of their life and passions.

Hopefully that answers your questions. This is an experiment, but hopefully it will be satisfactory for everyone. At the end of the day, my channel, like this blog, is a creative outlet for me rather than a career path, and sometimes that means decisions that are right for me which might not necessarily be an optimal channel growth strategy.

My new videos are going to focus on being artistic and genuine, showing some of my adventures in life in a way that hopefully will allow anyone to enjoy the atmosphere of them regardless of whether you share that hobby, appealing to a broader audience than those very specific videos.

Whenever I get the chance I love to travel. Honestly, I’ll go about anywhere just to see a new place. Sometimes I travel with people. Sometimes, as I did recently, I travel alone.

Traveling alone isn’t most people’s first choice. Extroverts (I assume) want to travel with family or friends to share the experience with someone and introverts (like myself) want to travel with companions to limit interactions with strangers (okay, sharing the experience can be nice too). But in this article, I want to speak in defense of solo travel and share why if you haven’t you really should give it a try.

Expand comfort zone

I’ll tackle the biggest obstacle first: your comfort zone. Traveling alone can seem scary. What if I get lost in the airport? What if people think it’s odd that I’m by myself? What if something goes wrong when I’m all by myself? What if people try to talk to me because I’m alone?

But getting out of your comfort zone can be one of the best things about solo travel because it gives you the opportunity to expand said comfort zone. The first time you fly alone you’ll probably be worried about getting lost in a strange airport forever, but once you do it you’ll realize that airports have really good signs, any employee can help you, and there are maps online if you get really lost.

If you’ve ever been alone trying to find a product in the grocery store then you can manage to find the giant gate at the airport, but your comfort zone will tell you that this is somehow much harder. By doing it anyway you can retrain your brain to realize that you are more capable than it wants to think and gain confidence for the future.

Take control of the booking

If you’ve ever tried to travel with a group of friends you can appreciate how hard that is to schedule and book. You have to find a time when no one has plans and everyone can take time off work, agree on a place to go, find a place to stay, book the lodging and get reimbursed by your friends, and get everyone to book the same or compatible flights. Everyone’s budgets also have to be considered and others may have more or less to spend on the trip than you.

But one of the things I love about traveling alone is that I don’t have to worry about any of that. I still have to find a time that I can take off work, a place I want to go, and a place to stay, but it’s much easier to find a time and place for myself than for a group, and I don’t have to worry about the trip falling through because someone can’t make it.

Wander freely

Once you arrive at your destination, one of the best things about solo travel is that you don’t need to coordinate sightseeing with anyone. I love being about to just explore the area at my own place and at my own whims. Group travel often requires a timetable and pre-arranged destinations but solo travel allows you to leave when you wake up, see whatever catches your eye, and return when you get tired.

Now I do still recommend having some schedule, a list of places you want to see, and making reservations in advance as needed, just to keep yourself on track and make sure everything goes smoothly. But when you’re by yourself there’s more flexibility to deviate from your plans however you desire and even have extra time in the schedule to use spontaneously.

Time for personal activities

Some things are better alone. You might have a different list, but for me three practices I prefer alone are photography, writing, and meditation. To expand even further, I would add reading, watching educational content like Skillshare classes, and sometimes just thinking. All of these things can benefit from the inspiration of doing them in a new location, but all of them can also be hindered by the presence of other people.

Take reading, something most people can probably relate to. If you’ve ever tried going to a park to read, or even just sitting on your porch, you know how relaxing it can be to find a new and peaceful location to read a good book. Even required reading for school is improved by a change of scenery. But if you’ve ever tried to read while hanging out with a group of friends you know how that distraction can make it almost impossible to read or study.

In the busyness of life, it can be so hard to have the time or take the time for these activities, but they can be wonderful for your mental health and personal development, and traveling alone provides a great opportunity to dedicate some time to them and gain some extra inspiration.

I could write so much more about solo travel but for now, I’ll abbreviate my thoughts here. If you want to hear more of my thoughts on traveling alone or other topics, though, follow along on the blog! You can subscribe to emails in the lower right corner, follow me on Instagram, or see the latest post any time at blog.emmettbudd.com/new

Recently on my YouTube channel I shared a video in which I filmed a montage of myself making a cup of tea. Here, today, I thought that I would take you behind the scenes into my creative process from that day, which was much more than what you see in the montage or even the video about filming it. Set up and filming began around 1:00 in the afternoon, but at 8:30 in the morning I was already preparing myself mentally.

Was all of that necessary? Likely not. But it added something to the day and turned a creative task into a day of creative self care.

Journaling

I began the day with some journaling. Writing whatever comes into my head always helps me to be more creative, because it allows me to clear my head whenever there are any distracting thoughts by writing them down and then let my mind explore creativity on its own without any rules or limitations, just words flowing onto the electronic page.

“It’s looking like a beautiful Saturday morning outside, the sun has just come up maybe a couple hours ago, and it’s casting a warm light across the landscape outside,” I wrote. “Everything outdoors still looks very bare: the trees are leafless and the grass is dead. But you can tell, somehow, that spring is starting. The air isn’t as bitter as it was, especially this morning on what is supposed to be a warm day.”

From there, I wrote about my plans for the day, using it is a space to think about the details and flesh out ideas. I noted my plans, ideas, and concerns, using it as a way to think through how to accomplish my goals and release any worries that I had about it.

Mental Stimulation

After I’d written a bit, I made a cup of tea and switched to some mental stimulation to get my mind alert. I find that there are many things that make me more engaged with the world mentally, but also many things that really just shut my brain off. Many relaxing things, like TV and games, while they certainly have their place when I need a break, are really designed to let my mind shut down and disengage, which isn’t what I need at the beginning of a day of creativity. Instead I need my brain up and moving.

One way to achieve this is to get my body up and moving. Go for a walk or grab some weights. But on this occasion I decided to go for some brain games instead, and after solving some puzzles I felt much more alert.

Physical Needs

Now that I was awake and had met some of my mental needs to properly orient myself towards the day, it was time to meet my physical needs. Sometimes I wish that my physical needs didn’t need met, because it can disrupt my flow. My creative flow would love to skip breakfast and just start creating, but if I did that I would quickly find that my body stopped being able to keep up with my ideas, and then that the ideas too stopped coming from a lack of energy. So instead it is vitally important for a day of creativity, or for any day, that all of my physical needs are met. Towards that end, I showered and ate some breakfast, and then took a bit of a break, to be physically prepared for my filming.

Preparing to Film

After all of that I felt ready to get ready to film, but I was a bit nervous about actually starting the camera, which isn’t unusual when I’m about to do something different. Even though I knew it would be fun, I was also worried that it wouldn’t turn out or that something would go wrong. So the first step in preparing to film is often to take a few deep breaths and clear my mind.

Then the setup process begins, during which I often put on Spotify’s Peaceful Piano playlist just to help myself feel even more relaxed as I begin filming, because I often find that when I am most relaxed I am also most creative.

It’s during the somewhat lengthy setup phase that I get out all of my equipment, layout the set, and set up the camera and lighting. I also take some time to review any notes, script, or shot-list, think about the mood I’m trying to convey in the film, and make last minute changes for new ideas that come to me.

Finally I mic myself up and hit record.

After Filming

Since I don’t typically edit things immediately after filming them the creative part of the process for the day really ends there, but the process doesn’t. At this point it’s time for the more unfortunate part of the process: the cleanup.

On top of the mess, there’s often a weird feeling after doing something creative. Exhaustion, accomplishment, and disappointment that it’s over, all at once. Opening my journal once again, I wrote, “And so that, I suppose, is likely the end of the creative process for today. It feels like a rather abrupt ending, but that’s how it is. After a few hours of strong creative focus, I’m left with some uncut footage and a big mess. The project is over for now, and there’s a similar feeling to the one you get when guests leave the house after a long awaited visit or Christmas Day is over. I’m sorry it’s over, but I’m also tired and need to clean the house.”

Lights, cameras, and tripods needed put away, and displaced items needed returned to their homes. By the end of filming the tea montage video my bed was covered with random things to get them out of the way or lay them out for easy access. My coffee maker was on the dresser and everything from a teleprompter to a partial box of plastic bags was on the bed.

Trying not to sit down too long for fear I might not want to get back up, I engaged in a flurry of cleaning, after wish I was tired but finally able to rest. I wish I could say that all this creativity had left me feeling ready to conquer the world, but the reality of the situation is that creativity most often just leaves me ready for a nap.

Creativity can be a form of self care, because it’s also an activity that takes energy, so it’s important to take care of yourself afterwards too. Rest, go for a walk, or whatever else you might need. Enjoy the sense of accomplishment, without feeling bad about not doing more “work”. There will be time in the future for other things that want your attention like cleaning, and there will be time for editing, but for now you’ve done enough.

Obviously much of this is not a necessary part of a creative project and I don’t do all of these things every time, but I do try to do what of them I can whenever possible to get the most enjoyment and creativity possible. Filming a video is always fun, but there’s something special about making a day out of it and engaging in some self care along the way. No matter what activity you like, I would encourage you to occasionally wrap it in other relaxing activities as well and take the time to really be in the moment, forget the world, and fully enjoy it.

Curious about my editing process after filming? Check out this video editiong walkthrough in Final Cut Pro:

We have, once again, come to the end of a year. You’ll have to make your own determination as to whether 2021 has been any better than 2020, I suppose, but I think we can all agree to wishing for 2022 to be better. Nevertheless, I have had some good times. In the past year I went on a monthly hike for landscape photography, which was one of the goals I set for myself and became the basis of a new YouTube channel. I also read a book nearly every month, another goal, and even got to do a bit of local travel which I had listed as my “impossible goal” last year.

As we head in to the new year, I thought I would briefly highlight some of my favorite books, podcasts, YouTube channels, and musicians from the past year, and then share a bit about how I plan the new year and some tips for keeping your own New Year’s Resolutions.

The best books I read in 2021

1. Why We’re Polarized, Ezra Klein. Written by Ezra Klein, a journalist, political analyst, and cofounder of Vox, this book is very helpful in understanding our current political landscape on America.
2. The Algebra of Happiness, Scott Galloway. Scott Galloway is a podcast host, entrepreneur, and NYU professor, and this book is derived from his most popular brand strategy lecture, in which he discusses life strategy.
3. Unoffendable, Brant Hansen. In this book Christian radio host and author Brant Hansen overturns the concept of righteous anger and proposes that not only does God want us to let go of our anger but also how much better our life will be when we do so.

Honorable mentions go to The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, which is a slow read but well worth the time, and White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity by Robert P. Jones, which I haven’t yet finished.

My favorite podcasts from 2021

1. The Lana Blakely Podcast. This is the only podcast I have consistently listened to every episode of since it’s inception a few months ago. There is no particular topic to the podcast, instead stemming from the often deep thoughts of YouTuber Lana Blakely.
2. The Weeds. This in-depth policy and politics podcast from Vox is my go to to keep me awake on late night drives home. Maybe I’m a bit of a nerd.
3. Pivot. In this podcast from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway share their thoughts on current events in tech, business, and politics.

Who I’ve been watching on YouTube

1. Becki and Chris. I discovered this gem of a channel this year and have been loving their videos from filmmaking to travel. Even if you’re not a creator yourself, you should check out their Heading East travel series.
2. Lizzie Peirce. Photographer and filmmaker Lizzie Peirce regularly releases videos on a variety of topics relevant to other creators: photoshoots, reviews, travel, and more.
3. Peter McKinnon. A third photographer and filmmaker who really needs no introduction, Peter McKinnon has 5.6 million followers on YouTube, and while I’ve followed him for some time, I have particularly enjoyed his videos this year.

I realized while writing this that all my favorite YouTubers from the past year have a similar genre and aesthetic and are all from Canada…

Can I give an honorable mention to my own channel? I spent a lot of time playing back my videos to edit them, so much so that I can’t think of anyone else with educational content I’ve consistently watched.

Who I’ve been listening to

1. Taylor Swift
2. Imagine Dragons
3. Billie Eilish

Honorable mentions go to Bastille, who are still my fav, and Blü Eyes, an incredible indie artist I discovered this year TikTok

Turning To the New Year

Statistics surrounding New Year’s resolutions vary greatly, but I think it’s safe to say most of us at the turn of the year are setting some sort of goal. Even if you don’t make any formal plans, there’s just something about the turn of the year that symbolizes new beginnings and prompts thoughts of how next year will be different. Sure, January 1 is just one day after December 31—it doesn’t even line up with the winter solstice, when the earth is tilted farthest from the sun, for complicated reasons involving competing holidays and Janus the god of doorways—but it feels significant.

Gods and doorways aside, I, like many people, tend to set some goals for the new year. Originally this meant selecting some resolutions that sounded nice, maybe writing them in a notebook, and broadly failing to complete any of them. But over the last two years the process has been a bit more complex and is, therefore, perhaps worth sharing.

Now, I want to be clear from the start that this methodology is not my own design. As I have previously mentioned, I began in 2020 using a worksheet created by Denys Zhadanov, the Vice President of Readdle, along with a team of volunteers, who were themselves inspired by the work of others, and as I am writing this that worksheet is still available for free from myway2020.com. Last year I converted that worksheet into a Notion template, which I have further improved the layout of for use this year. Thus it is only standing on the shoulders of giants that I am writing to you today.

The first step of effectively making plans for the next year is to evaluate the past year. Take time to question how you did in various aspects of your life and recall the moments you enjoyed the most. Think about how you succeeded and how you failed. What little things you enjoyed regularly and people you had good times with. Not only are these insights very therapeutic (and challenging at times) but they also are extremely valuable in creating New Year’s Resolutions. It’s only after I’ve evaluated last year that I begin to think about next, and when I reach that point creating goals for the entire year seems much less daunting. Some might be to continue something from last year, some to increase something I liked, and others to eliminate a bad habit.

I dare say a lot of resolutions fail because the person who made it just wasn’t that passionate about it. But if you’ve ever been asked what you’re passionate about and drawn a blank, you’ll understand just how difficult it is to really know your own passions. Chances are, though, that you’re already doing things you love, at least sometimes, or at the very least you know which current things you hate. Some of your goals for next year might be to try something entirely new, and that’s great, but you may find it’s not for you, so committing regularly engaging in this new activity might be doomed to failure from the start.

Effective goals aren’t necessarily about a complete change of lifestyle. Most of us don’t need a drastic overhaul. Instead, think about how you can fine tune the life you have to be just a bit better. If you really enjoyed something this year, plan on doing that type of thing again or more, and similarly plan to eliminate things you don’t like where you can.

If you do feel a need to completely change your lifestyle, remember to start slow and plan attainable goals to complete throughout the year, rather than changing everything on day one. Too much at once will likely be overwhelming and frustrating. Instead have a fresh small goal every two weeks or month that gets you where you want to be by the end.

How to Keep Your Goals

Historically I’m been quite bad at forming new habits, but I have learned several techniques I find helpful in actually keeping my goals long term.

1. Make them yours

Make sure that all the goals you set for the new year are things that you really want or need to do. There are countless things that society will tell us we should be doing in our lives, and it’s super easy to set goals for ourselves and then measure ourselves against things that we don’t really want.

For example, your coworker has a nicer car than you. You’re fine with your current car, but you set a goal of getting a new one. What you actually want, though, is something else, and that’s what you put your money towards. Then you feel bad about not saving more and driving your old car. Does anyone around you actually care that don’t have a fancy car? Probably not. Do you really want a fancy car (at least in this example)? No. So then why is that a goal?

2. Ensure they are attainable

It can fine and even good to set yourself one or two impossible goals for the year. Maybe you’ll be surprised and be able to accomplish them, maybe they’ll become goals for next year, or maybe you just laugh them off later. But don’t make all or even most of your goals impossible.

Balance your ideals with reality. Going to the gym every day might sound nice, but is that realistic? Probably not. Instead aim for something you’re likely to be able to achieve. You probably want to push yourself a little bit, but not to the point that you give up and certainly not to the point that you feel bad for not accomplishing something that you physically couldn’t have.

3. Start small and set specific steps

A huge failing of traditional New Year’s Resolutions is that they all begin in full force on January 1st. You hang the new calendar and boom: eating healthy, gym four days a week, meditating half an hour a day, reading a book each month, catching up with old friends, learning a language, and so on.

Humans aren’t really designed to start one new habit all at once, let alone several. But the year is 12 months long—365 days—so why do we pin it all on that single moment in time after we’ve stayed up late partying? In fact, January 1st maybe don’t start a single new goal. Get some sleep.

Don’t make your goals all being suddenly all at once, because that’s doomed from the start. Begin with a small portion of the goal, a first step, and ease in to it. Put some less urgent ones on the calendar to start on a few months.

5. Time for all your goals

A day has 24 hours. For most people 8 of those are spent sleeping and another 8 working. Of the remaining 8, some goes to necessary things like eating. There’s a decent chunk of time left, sure, but we do have to be wise about how we spend it and not overbook ourselves.

Think about the amount of time your goals are going to take, not just individually but also as a whole. Do you actually have time in your days for them? Are there things you want to stop doing to make the time available or do you need to eliminate a few goals?

Similarly to my last tip, this is all about making sure your goals are possible. If you’re trying to add hours of work to your week, as good as it may be, it’s just probably not going to be sustainable. You might be able to do it for a while, but then get burnt out, or you might just not be able to do it at all. Either way you end up worse off than when you started because you’re now tired and feeling bad about not accomplishing what you set out to.

6. Re-evaluate regularly

Once you have your goals in place, make sure that you schedule times in the future to revisit and re-evaluate them. A year is a long time. I’m pretty future oriented, but even I have difficulty making specific goals that far out.

Initially you’ll likely write goals with specific steps for the first few months of the year. As you do, create reminders to re-evaluate those goals once the specific steps have ended. At that point you can think about whether the goal is still a priority, since your situation might have changed, what new steps to take within that goal for the next few months are, and so forth.

Hi friends! I recently took a trip to an Airbnb to relax and focus on my mental health, in the form of what was essentially my own personal retreat, and because I enjoyed it so much I wanted to share it with you in case you might enjoy something similar.

Over on my YouTube channel you can find a vlog of the trip in which I've shared more personal thoughts, so if you want to hear specific things I learned or see more of the location definitely go check that out! Here, though, I'm going to focus on how I planned the trip leading up to it and the activities I selected.

Background

There are many reasons why you might want to take a few days off work, travel somewhere, or spend time focusing on your mental health, and in fact it was a combination of several things that lead me to pull the trigger and do so, although most could be attributed to the pandemic.

For the past year I have been working from home. I have genuinely preferred working from home because of the amount of time and money I save by not driving and the additional flexibility of being able to pause the workday for a personal project and resume it later, however it does have its downsides as well. One of the biggest is that most of my time is spent on my computer at the desk. I custom built the desk last year, and it's a great desk if I do say so myself, but between 40 hours a week of work and maybe 20 of hobbies in the same place it can be a bit of a bore.

Another problem I've been realizing lately is a lack of self care in my life. I take care of the sort of critical things: usually sleeping enough, showering, eating and drinking, taking walks; but smaller things get overlooked. Cleaning up work at the end of the day and on work time, for example, including things like the coffee cups that you might otherwise wash before leaving the office, instead of letting that mess transfer over to your personal life. Playing relaxing music. Taking random photos just for fun. Enjoying a tasty treat. Just staring out the window for a minute.

And the final thing is that I've been saving up my vacation time for no apparent reason. Initially, early in 2020, I was saving it for a vacation, and then when that got cancelled, for a longer vacation when COVID-19 went away. Then it became saving it because there wasn't much to do if I took time off. Then I got busy at work and felt bad taking time away from the project because it's something I'm very proud of. Eventually I just got comfortable not taking time off and didn't want to because it was now outside my comfort zone to stop working and go somewhere, even though that used to be a common occurrence. When I started taking a few hours off every week or two because I was nearing the cap of how many vacation days I can keep I realized there was a problem.

When I found myself explaining to my therapist how much I missed traveling and the reasons in my mind why I couldn't, I began to see that most of the barriers were either gone, like stay at home orders, of my own making like the need to step out of my comfort zone, or surmountable, like not wanting to go to far or not knowing what to do.

And so, this trip was born.

Planning

The secret to a good trip is a good plan.

I know there are people out there who love to just get in their car, go somewhere, and see what they find, but that's not how I like to travel. I can certainly appreciate spontaneity, and even enjoy it when I'm with someone spontaneous, but I'm just not good at it. If I don't have a plan I'll spend all my time either deciding what to do or on social media because I don't know what to do.

For this trip, I decided on fewer adventures and more focus on mental health. If I'm honest, the idea just came about because most places near anything were already booked. But I enjoyed the trip so I'm glad it did.

1. Choose a Place

The first step of any trip is to pick a place to go. If you're planning a trip for mental health or self care specifically, then the most important thing is to find somewhere that is safe, calm, and quiet. Airbnb has lots of cute options for a pleasant day in. Check out the area a bit for shops in case you forget something, restaurants, and one or two activities you might enjoy like hiking.

2. Plan your Travel

Next you need to figure out how to get to this place: whether to drive or fly and what sort of time and cost are required. If you're driving, look for opportunities to do something fun along the route. At this point you can get a better idea of the total price of the trip and begin to book everything as well.

3. Plan Activities

What you do with your trip is really up to you, but I will have details below of what I did to give you some inspiration.

I suggest starting the trip with some normal activity that you enjoy, which for me was hiking, and then do another activity you enjoy at the end, if you have time. In between take a day to stay in and focus on yourself. If you're not used to doing a lot of self care, sandwiching the self care between other things helps to avoid feeling like the trip was a waste of time.

On your self care day, choose some classes or videos to help you learn new self care skills and pick some relaxing activities to do like coloring or meditation. Again, these can be whatever you like, but choosing them in advance will help you to have a structure and plan when you get there.

4. Plan Food

Obviously you'll need to eat on your trip, and I suggest doing at least some of your own cooking for the experience of it, although a backup restaurant or sandwiches just in case doesn't hurt.

You'll want to plan meals for the travel there and back and each meal while you're there. If you aren't crazy about cooking don't forget there are still plenty of easy options that can be done on the road without too much trouble. Personally, I made canned chili and spaghetti with a jar of sauce for my dinners: nothing difficult or fancy, but enough to connect with the cooking experience.

Choose some snacks and beverages you enjoy as well. Chocolate, cheese, wine, tea, coffee, etc. Things that make you happy. Pack some to partake of at your leisure throughout the trip.

5. Plan Details

Finally, plan the details of the trip. This doesn't need to be done far in advance, but at some point before you leave make a rough schedule in blocks of an hour or two of what you're going to do and when.

Without a plan there's a likelihood, at least for me, to get off track, waste time, spend too much time on one thing and not enough on another, and so on. Not to mention I might just totally forget the plans I had. I don't suggest planning things down to the minute, because you want to have some flexibility and you don't want to get off the schedule right off the bat and never get back on again. Leave in some extra time so you're not rushed and make paint in the activities with a broad brush.

My Trip

Again, your mental health retreat can look however you want, but if you want some ideas from mine I'll show you below exactly what I did!

Lodging

First of all, here's the Airbnb that I stayed at:

Airbnb: Vacation Rentals, Cabins, Beach Houses, Unique Homes & Experiences

Airbnb

I recommend staying somewhere that looks inviting to your: personally I found this place to be really cute and if you're in the area I'm sure the host wouldn't mind more customers, but really anywhere that looks nice to you from any company is totally fine!

Classes

I selected classes from Skillshare, which requires a paid membership, but if you have Skillshare or are considering it I do recommend these classes, and otherwise feel free to browse the titles for ideas (in order of completion):

• Self-Care for Creatives by Jade Sta Ana
• How to Create Your Own Self Care List by KW Professional Organizers
• How to Not Feel Like A Failure by Rebecca Gibson
• How to use and implement change to improve your life by Raymond Baxter
• Productivity: How to Plan and Schedule a Stress-free Workweek by Rey B.
• Bullet Journaling for Self Care and Productivity by Wanda The Brave
• Changing Habits: 101 by Zachary Phillips

Schedule

This is my schedule so you can get an idea of what it looked like, but yours will obviously look different! You can see I blocked it off on hour to several hour intervals, and suggest you do the same. The idea is to have enough structure to keep yourself on track but not so much you can't be flexible and adapt.

Day 1:

11:00 Hiking, photos, and video

2:00 Drive to AirBnB, check in

4:00

Focus on the surroundings: Sights, sounds, and feelings.

• Arrive and Check In
• Explore the house and property.
• Settle in
• Journal. Journaling will help clear your mind, relieve the tension of a new place, and prepare you for the visit. Resolve any lingering thoughts.

7:00

• Make Dinner (Heating Chili)
• Self-Care for Creatives by Jade Sta Ana

8:00

Just list some ideas in advance for a bit of free time, these were mine

• Consider Self-Care
• Mindfulness: Meditation, Journal, Hot Tub, Reflection
• Writing
• Shower
• Refreshments
• Reading

11:00 Bed

Day 2:

Remember to be in the moment. Make now about now and appreciate each detail.

Relax and enjoy the day. Don’t stress about completing the list or think about upcoming events. Enjoy pleasant food and drink.

9:00

• Make and Eat Breakfast
• How to Create Your Own Self Care List by KW Professional Organizers

10:00 Consider Self-Care and create a self care list

11:00 How to Not Feel Like A Failure by Rebecca Gibson

12:00

• Meditation
• Make at Eat Lunch
• Walk around the property

2:00

• How to use and implement change to improve your life by Raymond Baxter
• Hot Tub Time

4:00 Productivity: How to Plan and Schedule a Stress-free Workweek by Rey B.

5:00

• Build a Campfire
• Bullet Journaling for Self Care and Productivity by Wanda The Brave
• Reflection and Writing

7:00 Make at Eat Dinner

8:00 Changing Habits: 101 by Zachary Phillips

9:00

• Journaling to reflect on the day and on life.
• Shower
• Reading

11:00 Bed

Day 3:

8:00

• Shower
• Make and Eat Breakfast
• Pack a lunch

9:00

Take a few minutes to appreciate the trip and surroundings one last time

• Pack up
• Note my closing thoughts

11:00

• Check-out time
• Drive to park for exploration, photos, and video

3:00

• Drive back home
• Settle in at home
• Look at photos, video, or notes from the trip
• Spend time with family

I greatly enjoyed this trip and found it to be very helpful for me, so if something like this would interest you I highly reccomend it and hope this helps!

As a disclaimer, I am not a mental health professional and everything here is simply to tell you about my own life and give you ideas that might benefit you as well. Activities like the ones mentioned here can be great additions to your self care to boost your mental health but are not a substitute for therapy or other professional help if you are struggling, and if you find yourself in that situation I highly recommend therapy.

When I was little I hated fall. Fall is when the air starts to get cooler. I don't like being cold. Fall is when summer ends. I don't want summer to end. Fall is a time of change. I don't like change.

This year, though, I've been looking forward to fall for weeks. Fall has not changed, clearly, and I don't really think I've changed either. What has changed is my framing of the season.

While the framing effect, in which people stray from a rational choice depending on the way an item is presented, is considered a cognitive bias, I don't think this always means it must be avoided. To the contrary, I think that framing can at times be a positive tool to help us find motivation, energy, and even purpose in our lives.

At one point in my college career I decided to take up distance running. Previously I had never run much further than 5km, but now I was routinely running around 7 miles with minimal additional training to reach that extra distance. Physically I was already capable of adding those additional four miles, but accomplishing the extra distance required a mental shift. While good for your physical and mental health, running goes against the natural desire of your mind and body to conserve  energy and avoid pain. Shifting to distance running required a mental shift; a mental reframing. Instead of running on the treadmill purely for exercise, I now took it as an opportunity to explore new parts of the town. Instead of thinking about how sore and tired I was, I focused on how good I felt considering how far I had come. The circumstances weren't really any different, but my approach to them and thought pattern about them changed, and that made the difference between three miles and seven. There's a similar shift in my view of this season.

I've loved photography for a long time–since I was young, in fact–but only this year did I decide to fully lean in to that and regularly pursue the genres of photography I enjoy most, chiefly landscape photography. One of my goals for the year was to go on a hike each month of this year specifically for the purpose of photography, and, with the motivation of a new YouTube channel, I have faithfully pursued that goal. Spending a significant portion of time not only out in nature, but focused on the appearance of that nature, has reframed my view of the changing seasons.

Each new season now brings with it new opportunities. Each new season certainly has its downsides, to be sure: winter was quite cold, spring was a bit dull after the snow and before the leaves, summer could be very hot, and now fall is bringing around colder weather once again. It's so easy to be focused on the downsides of any change. But what if we, instead, focused on the positives? Fall brings a fleeting opportunity to capture beautiful colored leaves. All summer my surroundings have looked quite similar, but with fall and the approach of winter comes a fresh new look to even the most familiar scenes.

Fall hasn't changed. I haven't changed. But my attitude towards the situation has changed. Instead of regretting that the summer has passed, this year I'm choosing to embrace the opportunity of the new season, use something I don't like as an opportunity for something I do, and enjoy the present moment.

This is a reminder, to you, to me, to all of us, to check our goals.

A study from YouGov found that in the last year just 35% of US adults kept all of their New Years resolutions, while 49% kept at least some. 16% kept none at all, and 1% selected, “Don’t know/can’t recall” suggesting they forgot them entirely.

65% of Americans don't keep all their New Year's resolutions

50% of the population was planning on or undecided about setting New Year’s Resolutions for 2021, optimistically, in spite of the strong evidence that they're unlikely to actually accomplish them.

I’ve take some time at the end of the last two years to reflect on the year that has passed and plan the next one. And, I don’t know how things are for you, but summer is where my goals to die. There’s a lot of reasons for this. For one thing, it’s just easier to get lost in the season itself and forget our goals. The warmer weather brings with it lawn care, gardening, and hot lethargic days; and also vacations, hiking, and other outdoor fun. For another thing, the summer, in the northern hemisphere, falls in the middle of the year, and for most people the middle is the hardest time to stay on track with a goal. At the beginning you’re excited about a new goal, and at the end, if you’re still committed and haven’t forgotten, you’re rushing to finish the goal before the deadline. But in the middle there tends to not be that much happening.

As time passes throughout the year, more and more distractions present themselves that can get us off track. Not necessarily bad distractions, either, just new things. For example, I planned this year to learn more Spanish, and purchased a subscription to Babble. But then I got interested in making videos for YouTube and advancing my photography, and pretty soon the time for studying Spanish went to watching YouTube videos and Skillshare classes in that space. Those are still good things, but they don’t actually help with the original goal.

By the end of the year, I often find that at least one of my goals failed simply because I forgot it entirely; another victim of my brain's peculiar inability to prioritize what information to keep what to discard.

As we’re entering September, though, it’s a good time to evaluate the progress of our goals. We’re far enough into the year that chances are you, like me, have lost track of your goals, but we’re still far enough from the end that there’s time to accomplish some things without trying to add them to the mad holiday rush.

So, if you made some goals for the year, now’s the time to review them. Take a few minutes, find where you wrote them down, and evaluate how things are going. What’s on track? What’s completed? What still needs some work or maybe hasn’t been started? Once you’ve evaluated them, think about how you’ll plan to complete these goals in the remaining few months. What will it take to check these off by the end of December? How can you practically do that?

September isn't normally when we think about our New Year's resolutions, but it's the perfect time to revisit them. It's not too late in the year to accomplish the ones we may have forgotten or slacked off on. Even if it was a daily goal, you can pick it up for the next four months and still finish the year feeling good about yourself. Even though it feels like the year is winding down, there's still 1/3 of it left, plenty of time to accomplish things.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm pretty sure in January I wrote down something to be doing about now.

It's May, 2021. I start off the month feeling good about life. I've just uploaded the first five videos to my new YouTube channel, scheduled to release over the next five weeks, and done so without compromising any of my other goals such as reading a book each month. My bedroom is clean, I've just gotten my second COVID vaccine dose; everything in my life is in order. Grandma has just arrived from out of state to stay with us for a couple weeks, so I plan on putting off my goals like reading and filming next month's videos to maximize the time I can spend visiting with her.

Fast forward a couple weeks, Grandma leaves, and over the next few days I resume life as usual. On Sunday I go to church for the first time in months, since I'm fully vaccinated. And I get a cold. Not a bad cold, but enough that in the evenings I'm too tired to do much.

Combined, the good and the bad prevented me from really getting anything done in May. I didn’t read a book and I recorded the first June video for my YouTube channel on the last day of May. My room didn’t get cleaned and became a huge mess. Tasks backed up in my to do list. Last minute filming in June threatened to throw off my upload schedule on the second month of my channel’s existence. Everything was a month behind schedule.

We’ve all fallen behind at some point in life. Actually, if you were to monitor my to do list, you might think I make a habit of being behind, an unfortunate reality that is likely due to my weekend plans most often being to experience a super-human burst of energy and efficiency and accomplish two-dozen tasks without any obstacles.

Today, though, I'm essentially all caught up.

My task list is at a reasonable level. My cleaning and other chores are done. All this month's videos were released within the first week, leaving the remaining weeks to start the videos for next month. I haven't gone back and read books for the time I missed, largely because I was already ahead, but I am ready to start reading again. I've even had a bit of time to continue the Stardew Valley game I started while I was sick.

When you get behind, how do you get back on track again? Here are 5 tips:

1. Acknowledge the situation

Your state of mind is very important as you try to get caught up: if you're discouraged, you'll give up, but if you're calm, organized, and motivated, then things will go well.

Before you start anything, take a few minutes to think. If you've ever practiced meditation before, I recommend actually doing this in a meditative state. Pick a comfortable spot, for me this is lying back on my bed, close your eyes, take a few deep breaths and relax, clearing your mind. Then let your mind ponder the current situation and the tasks at hand.

Start by acknowledging the situation, without laying any blame. Often times we aren't even at fault for getting behind in things, but, honestly, it doesn't really matter. Even if your tasks are overdue because you've just been too lazy to do them, who cares? It makes no difference going forwards.

Next, acknowledge anything that's holding you back, especially things that are holding you back because of stress or fear. This in particular is why I prefer to do this in a meditative state, because I find that I'll often not realize what is holding me back until I am relaxed and free of distractions.

Acknowledge the situation, without laying blame, and anything that is holding you back, particularly because of stress or fear.

2. Prioritize the work to be done

Now that you've had some time to think, it's time to make a plan. Put the tasks in order, and, if you can, assign times to work on them.

At the top of the list, put the tasks that are holding you back. If you're worried about a task it's going to hang over your head and slow you down. To maximize your productivity, you need your mind to be free and calm, so start with the tasks that are stressing you. A phone call you're nervous about making, something with a nearing deadline, or anything else that you identified as bothering you; get that out of the way so you can move on.

After that the ordering is a bit more subjective, and can change with your mood. Sometimes it's good to make yourself do something you don't want to do, particularly if you don't expect you'll ever want to do it. For me, this is cleaning the bathroom. I'm never going to want to do it, so I've got to just pick a time and make myself do it anyway. But other times you don't feel like doing something today that you might want to tomorrow. This, for me, is filming. Some days I don't want to appear on camera, while other's I've got a story in my head I want to tell.

3. Focus and get things done

The planning is over, now it's time for the doing. There's no real way to glamorize this, sometimes you've just got to roll up your sleeves and do the work. There are a few things you can do to make it easier, though.

4. Cut distractions

Try to cut out distractions and things you're likely to send too much time on. You know what they are.

It's okay to take breaks, in fact, it's good to take breaks. You're human and you can't just do all this stuff without stopping. But, at the same time, watch out for taking too many breaks or to too long of breaks.

When I first started college, I took a lot of breaks, and I allowed them to be relatively long. In a way it made sense, I was doing work that was harder than I ever had before and I just wasn't ready to sit down and tackle all that homework at once, but as you can imagine this also resulted in my homework taking forever to complete. What I learned over time was that as I took more breaks, I wanted to take more breaks, and my mind felt tired sooner. But as I challenged myself to work on something longer I gradually didn't feel the need to take a break as soon.

Space out your breaks at reasonable intervals for optimal productivity and keep track of time on your break so it doesn't derail your work. It's easy to watch a couple TikToks over your break, but it's just as easy to keep scrolling TikTok forever.

Dedicate some work time, close your door or whatever you need to be left alone, and turn down anything that's going to take you away for a long time, whether it's a notification or an invitation to play a game or just Netflix. You'll never get caught up without doing the work.

5. Avoid burnout

At the same time, you'll never get caught up if you get burnt out and don't complete the work, so as you're focusing on work, also make sure that you take enough time for yourself.

The easiest thing to overlook when I'm working hard on something is sleep. When it's time for bed but I'm doing some work it's very tempting to stay up and work longer, because I assume more time will mean I get more done. But you have to factor in productivity, not just time. By staying up an hour later I might get more done today, but with less sleep I'll get less done tomorrow. Staying up can be helpful to finish something before a deadline, but in the midst of something that you plan on continuing for several days it's counter productive when you consider the future loss of productivity, and the resulting exhaustion from a few late nights can be a huge contributor to burnout.  Given that, I would say that the most important thing you can do to help yourself get caught up is to consistently get a full night's sleep.

The most important thing you can do to help yourself get caught up is to consistently get a full night's sleep.

You can probably see where this is going, but my next tip for avoiding burnout is to ensure you get plenty of food and stay hydrated. Our impression when we get behind is to think that self-care is less important until we're caught up, but in reality it becomes more important, because you're expending extra energy to do this extra work. Keep a bottle of water handy, eat some snacks, and get regular meals, even if you work during some of them.

Make sure your workspace is comfortable. Keep it a good temperature, if you can, particularly in these hot summer months. Nothing frustrates me more while I work than being too hot.

I like to give myself little things for motivation and comfort while I'm working. For example, if I'm going to sit down at my desk for a while I might make a cup of tea or coffee or a nice snack. When I can, I'll put on a show, podcast, or music while I work.

And, even though I just talked about regulating your breaks, make sure you take some breaks too. Sometimes you need to step away from something entirely to get a fresh view. This is another place where a bit of meditation or even just some deep breathing can be a useful tool to stay calm and clear your head for a bit.

Falling behind can feel like a death blow to your to do list, schedule, and dreams, but it really doesn't have to be. Hopefully these tips will help you to get back on track in no time! You've got this!

Hi friends! It's been a hot second since I wrote a post that wasn't a book review, but today I wanted to write up a bit about my experience getting the COVID vaccine, because I know there's still people who haven't gotten it and if you're considering it and are anything like me you probably want to know exactly what to expect.

More of a video person? Check out my YouTube video!

Two things to preface this post. First, if you aren't planning to get the vaccine this post isn't to call you out, if you want to know what my experience was like go ahead and keep reading but if not feel free to skip this one. I know there are both medical and personal reasons for people not to get the vaccine, and so even though I think the vaccine is great and may disagree with your reason for not getting it, my goal today is not to convince you to get vaccinated, it's just to share my experience with anyone who might be interested. Second, I'm not a doctor, so please don't interpret anything in this post as medical advice, and direct any medical or scientific questions to the appropriate professionals.

Getting the Shot

The process of getting the vaccine will no doubt look different depending on where you live and where you choose to go for it.

If you live in the US the vaccine is entirely free, regardless of whether you have health insurance and regardless of your immigration status. If you do have health insurance, the provider may ask for you insurance information, which transfers some of the costs from the government to the insurance companies as they cover it, but you should never be asked to pay any amount.

I was able to view locations to get the vaccine on Ohio's website, but if you're elsewhere in the country you can checkout vaccines.gov to find a location. From there I selected a health center near me that I was comfortable with and watched for available appointments on their website. I started looking for appointments as soon as the vaccines were available for my age group, so I had to wait a while for things to open up, but once there was availability I was able to book an appointment online. Calling them for an appointment is also an option, if you're in to that sort of thing.

The clinic I went to had a large vaccination area set up, which was very clean and organized, and they had security there as well so it felt very safe. Everything was set up in stages, and my girlfriend and I were able to go through each stage together. Several people seemed to have been brought by family or friends, and they were allowed to go through the process together as well. We started in a socially distance waiting area, progressed to a check in station where they collected our ID and insurance info, scheduled the appointments for our second shots, and then directed us to vaccination stations.

The shot itself was quick and painless. They ask a few questions before you get it, just to be sure you're not likely to experience any major side effects, and then do the injection. That whole process took maybe two minutes.

After that we went to another socially distanced seating area to wait for 15 minutes to be sure we didn't have an allergic reaction to the vaccine, and there were several nurses and a doctor monitoring everyone there. Once the 15 minutes were up we just checked out and were good to go!

In total, I would say this process took maybe 30 to 45 minutes.

Side Effects

I got the Pfizer vaccine, but side effects do vary from person to person, as well is across vaccines, of course, so your experience may be different from mine.

My arm was fairly sore after the first dose, similar to how a muscle feels sore after a workout, which is fairly normal after a vaccine. It took about four or five days for it to entirely recover, but it was just a minor discomfort. The second dose actually didn't make me quite as sore, probably due to the skill of the nurse more than anything.

I was slightly tired for a few days after the first dose, but it's hard to say whether that was actually caused by the vaccine, or by something else, like allergies or me just being busy and not getting quite enough sleep. My guess would be the latter.

I got the second dose mid afternoon, and was extremely tired the following day. A lot of people have felt sick that day after, but I felt entirely fine other than the exhaustion. Since I'm working from home I did work part of the day, but I took most of the afternoon off to sleep, and went to bed early that evening. The next morning, though, I felt completely normal, and haven't experienced any other side effects after that.

Life Changes

The latest guidance from the CDC states that you are considered fully vaccinated two weeks after your final dose, whether that's the second dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine or the single dose of Johnson & Johnson, and you are free to resume your normal life at that time. There may still be requirements to mask and social distance in your location or by businesses, as well as public transportation and air travel, and there are still requirements for international travel, but this guidance gives us a green light scientifically to feel safe going about normal life and doing anything we might have done before the pandemic started.

To me this is huge relief. For the past year I’ve cautious and a bit nervous about unavoidable activities such as getting groceries, even after the initial period where everyone was afraid to go out at all. There was a time of lockdown when I couldn’t even go see my girlfriend because we didn’t yet know what was safe with this completely unknown virus. But even a month ago I needed to be cautions in the grocery store, wash well after, and tried not to make too many trips. I would feel uncomfortable if my family mentioned being around someone who was sick, and I avoided going out for anything unnecessary, including watching church online even though it was open. Part of this concern was for myself, yes, because I don’t want to be seriously sick for weeks, but historically I’ve had a very strong immune system, so I was perhaps even more concerned about the possibility that I could get the virus and pass it to someone else who might get even more sick. Now, though, there’s much less concern about me either getting infected or infecting anyone else, which has given me a great sense of freedom and relief, even just at home, where I don’t need to be concerned about any germs that my family could bring into the house, and the things that I’ve continued during the pandemic, like grocery trips, feel safer and more comfortable now.

There are a number of things I love doing but have been avoiding for the past year, at least at times, like attending church in person, rather than streaming it online. Our church has been closed off and on, depending on the waves of the pandemic in our area, but prior to being vaccinated I hadn't actually attended in person since October because of my personal comfort levels. It has been very nice the past few weeks to return in person and catch up with friends I haven’t seen for months, help teach children’s Sunday school, and worship with everyone.

Another big thing I’ve missed in my personal life this year has been ice skating. In the before times I had made a habit of leaving work early every Friday to go skating on my way home, which is a great way for me to get some exercise, relax, and clear my head. When I’m on the ice I'm free of everything else. Ice skating isn’t necessary, though, so since the start of the pandemic my skates have stayed in their bag under my bed, with the exception of a couple occasions when I felt a need to take them out just to see them because I missed skating so much. From the moment vaccines were announced as a possibility I saw it as a way to get back to skating again, and a couple weeks ago I was able to return to the ice. This was endgame for me.

I expected getting the vaccine to be an emotional experience, but honestly it was more quick and surreal when it came to it. It felt pretty chill. But skating again made me choke up a little bit. It’s perhaps my favorite activity and returning to the rink was the real sign that normal life might be possible again.

The vaccine also has a lot of meaning to me as a photographer and new YouTuber, and as someone who loves traveling. Between work and pleasure I traveled five times in 2019 and once in early 2020; and I had a vacation with friends planned in May of 2020, which of course was cancelled. I love to see different places around the country and the whole experience of traveling, and it’s a great way to find new photography content as well. I am slightly more cautious about traveling than resuming activities locally, and I can’t drop everything and travel right away anyway, since personal travel requires a bit more planning and financing than business travel which hasn’t yet resumed, but the vaccine is the first step in that direction, and I really hope that I’ll be able to travel somewhere by the end of the year. Even for local photography as a landscape photographer I think I’ll feel more comfortable now that I’ve been vaccinated, since I won’t need to worry about any potential to pick up germs from someone else out on the trails.

And, finally, I’m looking forward to being able to have larger gatherings of friends, go out to restaurants or other fun excursions, and hopefully get back to all the things I used to do.

Again, I’m not writing this to shame anyone who hasn’t gotten vaccinated to to brag about the fact that I have. I feel very blessed to have had the opportunity to get vaccinated at all, and to have had this opportunity so much sooner than large parts of the world. This was the right decision for me. But, if it’s not right for you, we’re allowed to be different. I just wanted to share my experience getting the vaccine for anyone who might still be considering getting it, to help them know what to expect, and to share what it means to me to be fully vaccinated as a life update for you all.

My monthly reading in April took me to The Algebra of Happiness: Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love, and Meaningby Scott Galloway. This book, which is a relatively easy read, is full of life advice in the areas of financial success, love, and health. While not every section may necessarily apply to everyone, it is very practical and succinct.

Scott Galloway is a professor of marketing and brand strategy at NYU's Stern School of Business, which provides the origin story for this book, as Scott writes:

"In 2002, I joined the faculty of NYU’s Stern School of Business. More than five thousand students have taken my Brand Strategy course. My students are an impressive group, ranging from Marines from Georgia to IT consultants from Delhi. They are there to learn the time value of money, strategy, and consumer behavior. But our time together frequently veers from brand strategy to life strategies: What career should I choose? How can I set myself up for success? How do I reconcile ambition with personal growth? What can I do now so that I don’t have regrets when I’m forty, fifty, or eighty? We address these questions in the most popular session: the final, three-hour lecture titled “The Algebra of Happiness.” In the session, we examine success, love, and the definition of a life well lived."

In addition to being an NYU professor, Scott Galloway, who has a degree in economics and a masters in business administration, is an entrepreneur who has founded or co-founded nine companies, the host of The Prof G Show and cohost of Pivot, podcasts about business and tech, a blogger, investor, and at times a board member at high profile companies. He is what would commonly be considered very successful.

That's not how Galloway starts his book though. Instead he writes:

"I have no academic credibility or credentials to indicate I should counsel people on how to live their lives."

He goes on to describe mediocre grades, being initially rejected from UCLA, eventually being accepted with a grant from the state and partying his way through. After graduation he lied about his grades to get a job, went to business school, married, divorced, and started several companies which failed. He wraps up the introduction noting that his struggle with depression has led him to consider how to achieve happiness in addition to success.

If Solomon were around today, an atheist, and wrote Ecclesiastes, I imagine it would look something like The Algebra of Happiness: in turn logical, witty, crude, and brutally honest, to give everyone a kick in the pants and remind them to focus on the things that matter.

The book is concise and easy to read, with very little content that could have been omitted. This is the type of book that I always prefer. I don't have time to read anything that doesn't add something to the narrative and I find it easy to get bogged down in pedantic language (see what I did there?).

Parts of the book are based around simple equations, such as Resilience / Failure = Success or 1 + 1 > 2. Galloway shares his tips for how to be passionate about your job (find something you are great at and do it), how to invest (always be in the market because you're not smart enough to time it), and what do to if you're in a bubble (stay in a good firm, diversify your assets, and be humble about your success).

He talks about what to measure in life. For the author, this is net worth, credit score, social media following, how often he visits his aging father each year, how many students he has, and how many of his companies have succeeded or failed.

While the first section of the book, around a third, is about how to be successful, in the second section and longest section Galloway pivots to love. Here he talks about topics such as marriage, children, showing affection, and investing in relationships, as well as sometimes doing things we don't enjoy for the benefit of those we love. He also discusses dealing with the end of life in a very practical way: make both the person passing and their caregivers comfortable, spend time with them but also set boundaries so your own life is not neglected, talk and do activities together, and so on.

Throughout this section of the book Galloway frequently mentions his atheism, but not in a pushy way. While he is positive that God does not exist, his point in bringing it up is not to convince the reader of this but rather to explain his viewpoint. In fact, I recall once hearing him say that he believes one of the problems we see in America today is that not enough young people go to church, gather with other people, and recognize that they are a part of something bigger than themselves. You won't find a section of the book encouraging you to pray with your loved ones, start the day with reading scripture, or to take comfort during someone's passing in the hope of seeing them in heaven, but I think in our Christian monoculture we've heard these things too many times and could use some secular advice now and then. Not that those things aren't very good, but chances are you've heard it before.

The final and shortest section of the book focuses on health. Galloway has no medical training, so this isn't a section about how many pushups to do each day or the advantages of yoga. But he encourages things such as reasonable physical fitness, crying when needed, being a caregiver, being a nice person, and avoiding addiction. Nothing dramatic, just little things to help you be happy.

One of Solomon's conclusions from the book of Ecclesiastes is that people are more important than material things because they are the only thing we can take with us when we die. Galloway, although he does not believe in an afterlife, comes to a similar conclusion:

"In the end, relationships are all that matters."

I can't speak for everyone, but in my current position at least, as someone in their mid 20s who is thus far moderately successful but is still figuring out the strategy for success and happiness in life, I found this book to be a very practical guide from someone who has lived longer and experienced more than I have. Our life on this earth is finite, every day we have to make a decision about how we are going to spend it, and not infrequently we look back and think maybe we should have taken a different path, so I always find it helpful to hear from someone older what worked for them and what they might have done differently. Galloway does a great job of this in his book and frames his advice in a way that I found it easy to apply to my life, rather than it reading like a memoir about himself.

If this book interests you, as always you can check it out here using my affiliate link!

If you haven't read about my updates to my blog and my new YouTube channel, check it out here!

The Fix: Overcome the Invisible Barriers That Are Holding Women Back at Work

The first book I read this month was The Fix: Overcome the Invisible Barriers That Are Holding Women Back at Work by Michelle P King. The company I work for created reading groups and offered to pay people for extended hours to read this book as an optional diversity and inclusion training, so I admit that the reading was financially incentivized. Nevertheless I do think the book was a worthwhile read.

King, who has a masters degree in psychology, a post graduate diploma in journalism, an MBA, and is pursuing a PhD in the field of organization and gender, has worked for diversity and inclusion and women's equality in the workplace internationally, leading the UN Women's Global Innovation Coalition for Change and working for Netflix as the Director of Inclusion. She has spoken at TEDx and countless high profile organizations, been published in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and TIME magazine, and is the host of a weekly podcast, The Fix with Michelle King. In short, the author has no shortage of credentials.

Before discussing the content of the book, it is worth noting that it is somewhat...long winded. Honestly, if I may be critical for a second, it’s easily twice as long as it needs to be. It’s full of case studies which, while not wholly uninteresting, don’t really add anything to the overarching narrative. Don’t get me wrong, there is good content in the book, it just could have been written more succinctly.

A second complaint that I had about the book was that while the premise was broadly that stereotypes are holding back women in the workplace, it also relied heavily on gender stereotypes and traditional gender roles for a number of arguments. This doesn’t seem like large enough an issue to discredit the book or make it difficult to read, but I did find it odd. I’ll use some gender-stereotypical language in this post as I describe the contents of the book, but please understand that this is coming from the author.

It’s no secret that workplaces were designed by men for men in an era when it was assumed that men would work and women would be homemakers. The premise of this book is first, that this is the primary cause of workplace gender inequality, second, that the solution is fixing workplaces not women, and third, that men also stand to gain from this fix of workplaces.

Here’s the thing: large portions of the workforce weren’t really designed for people. The ideal worker is always available, ready to work whatever hours needed. They don’t need to leave early to pick the kids up from school or take a day off because a family member is sick. They don’t ask to work from home. They don’t take too much vacation. Their car never breaks down. They don’t need to take calls from the school or the babysitter. They don’t take time off to have children. They do all their housework on the weekend. They don’t bring their home like to the office. They leave the excitement or worry of home at home. They don’t sound very human, do they?

The best fit for this workplace is probably a robot, but of the human options, as it happens, straight white males are most suited for this. And this type of person does exist, apparently, several people mentioned identifying with this ideal worker model. But the fact is that for me, as a straight white male, this standard doesn’t work. If this is the standard, I’ll never be a perfect worker.

For women in the workplace there’s another layer on this, because are often expected to behave in a feminine manner, while at the same time being expected to fit in to a success prototype modeled after men. King writes that women’s career coaching often advises them to try to change their behaviors in order to fit the model of a perfect worker, but when women do this they run the risk of being seen as less feminine, drawing judgement. On the other hand if they act more feminine, they draw judgement for not seeming dedicated enough to their career or otherwise unfit for the workforce. Thus, she argues, the solution to gender inequality in the workplace is not fixing women, but rather it is fixing workplaces. Furthermore, fixing workplaces to work for women will also make them better for men.

There are studies showing that more diverse workplaces, as well as happier workplaces, have greater productivity and innovation, but unfortunately King did not cite any such studies (I can’t say whether they were available at the time of writing), so while it was clear how this change benefits employees, it was not stated how the change would benefit workplaces which left them with no real motivation to improve other than the goodness of their hearts.

Lots of people, men and women, don’t feel like they can be themself at work. They feel pressure to dress and act a certain way, leave their problems at the door, not laugh to little and be seen as cold but not laugh too much and be seen as lazy, and so on. Women are stereotypically less likely to fit the workplace, and often face the added pressure of maintaining the house and caring for children, thanks to traditional gender roles. The solution to gender inequality, as well as workplace morale in general, is to make a workplace where everyone feels they can be themselves, where everyone is promoted based on the quality of their work, and which allows people to adjust their schedule to fit their personal life without any repercussions.

As a lower level employee, regardless of gender, I suppose this is liberating in some way. If you’re a woman struggling to advance in your company, or to get hired in the first place, the problem isn’t you. You are an excellent worker and any team should consider themselves lucky to have you. If you’re a man wondering how you can help fix gender inequality, as long as you’re not perpetuating it, calling it out when you see it, and doing your best to make women on the team feel included, there’s probably not tons more you can do. In a way, though, it almost felt discouraging as well. I guess I wanted something more practical that could be done on an individual level, and was simply told, “Companies are designed wrong and need changed.”

Despite my complaints about the writing, this book was informative and a thought provoking look at how corporations could be improved to better serve their employees. If you’re interested, check out the book here.

Landscape Composition 1

The second book I read was Landscape Composition 1 by Mads Peters Iverson. Iverson is an award winning landscape photographer and YouTuber from Denmark with a stunning portfolio. While writing this I also learned that he has a masters degree in educational philosophy, which shows through in the way he wrote this book and how he crafts his videos. Sometimes it’s said that doers aren’t teachers, but in this case he literally is.

At 115 pages containing more pictures than words, perhaps “read” is too strong a term. But, after reading The Fix I wanted to pick up something a little lighter, and since I’m beginning to get into landscape photography more seriously this seemed like a good choice. This book covers subjects such as balance, symmetry, and negative space, with many large example photos, often marked up, and simple paragraphs explaining the technique. In a completely untechnical way, Iverson shows first class landscape photos and explains why they work, arming the reader in turn with knowledge and inspiration to select scenes and create photographs that stand out from snapshots.

This book was a very quick and easy read, I read most of it in a single afternoon, but it doesn’t seem like the sort of book I’ll want to only read once. Rather I expect that I’ll reread this periodically to maintain a continued understanding of what makes a good photo. I’ll also almost certainly buy the his second volume in the near future.

There’s nothing in the book you don’t need to know; no personal anecdotes or other narration. Just enough text to explain the composition. The book also doesn’t cover the camera settings used for the picture or get in to optics such as aperture or focal length. It’s assumed that you know how to use your camera but need to know what to take pictures of.

If you want to understand landscape photography better, you can buy this book directly from the author!

I've been super productive this month (March is my most productive month) and have implemented two new ways of putting out more and better content. I've refreshed my blog with a new platform and created a YouTube channel!

Blog Remodel

As you're reading this, you'll probably notice that my blog looks a bit different. That's because I've switched my blog over to run on Ghost! I started my blog years ago on Blogger and then moved it to WordPress after purchasing hosting. Using these platforms, though, it seemed difficult to customize the style and layout, add custom elements, and so on.

About a year ago I wanted to reject all that complexity and just focus on writing content, so I moved my blog to Notion. On Notion, you can't really change the styling of the page, that's not what it's designed for, but you can easily write in Notion's very simple interface, drag and drop images, and arrange things easily. Now that I feel a bit more committed to my blog, it seemed to be time to move it to a dedicated blogging platform for better features.

> Ghost lets me run my blog better while still rejecting complexity. It has everything I need, but nothing else.

What I like about Ghost:

• I own the entire system. There's no concern that changes by the services I use could cause extended downtime now. Of course, now it's up to me to keep it working, but Ghost seems very stable thus far.
• I can host my own instance for free (plus the cost of the hosting). This blog doesn't currently earn any money, so I want to avoid any extra costs to running it. Managed Ghost instances come with a fee, but there's no charge to install and run Ghost, which is open source, yourself.
• Easy to customize the theme. WordPress themes are customizable, but I never really figured out how. With Ghost I was modifying my theme within an hour, and the extra time was only because I had to uninstall/reinstall some packages on the server.
• The post editor uses markdown with a live inline preview and blocks of content, just like Notion. There's no sidebar and tiny text area like in WordPress, either, just a nice big white page where everything works like I'd expect. I can use markdown or manually add formatting by highlighting text and write with no distractions.
• Support for a block of custom HTML within a post. Ghost allows me to easily insert HTML into a post, but also to do so without editing the HTML for the entire post. Any place I need something special I can drop in some code super easily. This was technically possible with Notion, but required adding the HTML to a new page of its own and embedding it.
• Posts can be scheduled. When I was using Notion, since it's not designed as a publishing platform, I could not schedule a post to be released in the future, which meant that I often wrote or changed posts at the last minute and just as often forgot to post things when I meant to.
• URLs are clean and customizable. One downside of Notion was always that the URLs contained a long random identifier for the page.

What's new for you?

• You can subscribe to get new posts emailed to you. If you want to be sure that you don't miss anything, click the button in the lower right corner to be added to the email list.
• The style is now consistent with my website. For anyone finding one through the other this will provide a more unified experience, rather than feeling like two totally separate websites.
• Dark theme! The blog now defaults to matching the theme of your system, so if your computer or phone are in dark mode you'll see the blog in dark mode, and otherwise you'll see it in light mode. There's a button at the bottom of the page to manually select your theme if you desire.
• As I mentioned above, posts can be scheduled now, so release times should be a bit more consistent.
• The page loads much faster. Both the last two iterations of my blog, WordPress and Notion, have loaded quite slowly, but with Ghost everything loads up right away.
• Link previews on social media will actually reflect the post as you'd expect, rather than being a generic preview for the whole blog.
• You can browse by topic now!

What hasn't changed?

All the old content is here, and is still accessible at the same URLs, including blog.emmettbudd.com/new which will always take you to the latest post! I've also laid out the page similarly to the way it was on Notion, with featured posts at the top and older posts below, so it should feel familiar.

These changes also represent a commitment that I have to my blog. I enjoy writing and plan to continue to maintain this blog well in to the future, and the move to this new platform will help ensure that I am able to do that, by being reliable and professional while also being simple and easy to use without taking too much of my time, so that I can focus on writing!

YouTube Channel

The second piece of big news is that I've started a YouTube channel! This is something I've been considering for a while, especially since I prefer to consume video and audio content over written content, but it took a while for me to come around to actually creating a channel myself, because speaking aloud and appearing on screen is more forward than my introverted self is used to. Nevertheless, I have grown accustomed to the idea and found a microphone that makes me not hate the sound of my own voice.

What will be on the channel?

I decided this year to start taking my love for landscape photography more seriously, and as part of that journey I have created my new YouTube channel with a broad focus on landscape photography. Each month will start with a video in the field taking photos and a follow-up at my desk editing those photos. After that, I'll put out informational videos on photography, technology, and creative lifestyle, such as tips and reviews. New videos will be released at noon every Friday!

How's it going?

This is all in its early stages and obviously I'm still learning how to make good videos! I have purchased some basic equipment, though, which will help a lot, and also have watched many YouTube videos about creating YouTube videos.

The biggest pitfall to date has been purchasing a mic with very little wind rejection which didn't properly connect to my phone. There'll be a full review of the mic in a few weeks, but it's been replaced, so audio quality should be much better in the future. I also bought a gimbal, so videos should look nice and smooth the next time I go out hiking.

So far I am loving the process and have enjoyed adding YouTube to my list of hobbies. I'm excited (and perhaps a bit nervous) to put out new content on YouTube and grow my channel! My first video was released yesterday, so go check it out if you are interested!

Confession time: I've been a little angry lately. I'm not sure anyone has actually seen it, but the end of January especially I found myself frequently becoming very upset over minor things that didn't seem to be going my way. I'm not normally an angry person. I think maybe it was the weather, over January and February, that really got to me. So, I picked this book about letting go of anger off my shelf for February's book.

I used to read a lot before college, but I found that during college I not only didn't have time to read but I was also required to read a considerable amount for classes, and it just kind of ruined reading for me. So last year I tried to get in to reading a little bit, but very gradually, and this year I'm trying to read a book each month. I posted about it on Facebook last month, and there seemed like there was enough interest to warrant writing a full report on my monthly reading.

I've had Unoffendable for several years, but never actually finished reading it. It's written by Brant Hansen, who many people may recognize from the Christian radio scene; I grew up listening to him on Air1 Radio, and he's a host on WayFM. On the WayFM website, Brant's self-written about page says, "Brant is a Christian with a distaste for religion. He’s under the impression there was no religion in Eden, and there won’t be any in Heaven, either. Thank God. Politically, he’s pro-life, pro-science, and is allergic to political elitism, which means he’s waaay out of step with the reigning American monoculture."

That gives you an idea of the kind of guy Brant is. He's quirky and humble but also fun-loving and wise. He's passionate about the Bible, but has no tolerance for adding anything on or twisting its words. This comes out in his writing style. It's at times light-hearted and at times direct, and he's not afraid to attack commonly held Christian beliefs if he feels the Bible doesn't back them up. Which he does. That's what the entire book is about, actually.

Christian culture likes to tell us that anger is good. I've seen blog posts and even books about that, actually. But the Bible doesn't actually affirm that. This book immediately makes a case for anger being bad and sinful, arguing that there is not even such a thing as righteous anger for people, since we are not God and thus not righteous. This is something of a radical idea, but the author provides plenty of supporting evidence from various passages of scripture to drive the point home.

What this book doesn't do, though, is make you feel guilty for your anger. It's not all, "Look at how sinful you are!" or "Stop being angry or you'll go to hell!" Which I appreciate, because I find guilt doesn't often make me a better person, it just makes me feel bad for continuing in my errant ways.

Unoffendable takes a different approach, suggesting that life will be easier if we are less angry. Get rid of your anger to please God, yes, but also get rid of your anger for you. You don't need the added stress of holding a grudge or being angry about something you can't control. "Ain't You Tired?" asks the title of Chapter 8. Relax. You don't need to be angry about wrongs or offended by people's immoral behavior or mad about the things that didn't go as planned. God is the judge, God is in control, take a deep breath and let him do his job.

It's important not to confuse anger with action and lack of anger with inaction: we can still fight against injustice or seek to resolve issues without being angry. But we can approach those things in a calm and rational way, which will likely be more effective and will certainly be less stressful.

The book I read last month, Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein, highlighted how in part political polarization in America stems from people forming identities and then taking offense to anything which conflicts with one or more of those identities, and even taking offense as if the violation is against their entire spectrum of identities. This offense partly explains how it seems that our American political parties can't begin to have a conversation on anything and bipartisanship is so rare. Unoffendable seems to suggest a different response, not that we must agree with everything, but that we love people we don't agree with and even be friends with them, having rational discussions instead of treating their stance on one issue as an affront on our entire being. What would the world be like, I wonder, if Christians couldn't be offended?

For me, this book brought a lot of relief. It helped me to take a step back, inhale, exhale, and remember that things don't have to go exactly the way I think, in my small mind, that they should. If I don't get as much done in an evening as I wanted or I lose a game or something breaks, the world keeps turning. God isn't standing over me with a stick expecting perfection. If somebody does something I think is wrong, the world keeps turning. God isn't expecting me to judge them. So why be angry?

I'll leave you with this quote:

"I don't control anyone, because that's God's job. That's His deal. I can just enjoy and love people. As I keep saying, I wish I would've known this sooner. I wish I could've seen the entire redemptive, narrative arc of the Bible, rather than cherry-picking the few bits that seemed, when isolated, to suggest disengagement with sinners. But the good thing is, I've finally learned: Don't condemn the culture; redeem it." ~ Unoffendable by Brant Hansen, page 84

If this book interests you, you can check it out here. The links in this post are affiliate links.

I love landscape photography. It's an introvert's dream: hiking, creating, and minimal human interaction.

I recently told the story on my redesigned website of how my love for photography started at six years old, when my parents gave me a point-and-shoot film camera. I loved taking pictures with that camera. When it was loaded up with film I took pictures of pretty much everything. Relatives, train sets, stuffed animals. You know, six year old stuff.

Another time when I was small, my grandparents took me and my cousin to Dearborn Michigan to visit the Henry Ford Museum, and gave each of us one of those yellow Kodak disposable cameras. The one roll of film, something like 30 pictures as I recall, was all we got for the three day trip. I think I was a bit older then, and those pictures are a little better. The subjects are entirely in frame and I was more concerned about getting good pictures of the things that mattered.

My interest in landscape photography, though, really started when my family took a series of vacations to Yellowstone, the Black Hills, and the Grand Canyon. Most people had switched to digital cameras at this point, although it was only a few years later, so I was essentially allowed to take as many pictures as I wanted; and at the same time I was presented with some of the most beautiful landscapes in the country. My family did a lot of hiking on these vacations. Up mountains, down into the canyon, that kind of hiking. Never more than a day, but frequently long enough we had to pack our lunch to eat on the trail. Out there, a couple hours hike up the side of the mountain, you can get incredible landscape photos even if you’re inexperienced.

If you don’t like to hike, you won’t like landscape photography. But for me hiking and photography generally go hand in hand. I don’t only take pictures when I hike, in fact with an iPhone always within reach I take pictures of everything that interests me, but when I hike I always take pictures.

Most frequently when I'm hiking somewhere, though, I go with my close friends, which means, we've gone to hike. I take some pictures along the way, most often with my phone, but it's not the sort of affair where I can set my tripod up and spend an hour in one place like so many landscape photographers I follow on YouTube do. I haven’t done much of that at all, actually. Several times during college I took my camera out just for photography, but before and since photography has usually been something to do along the way and not necessarily the object.

So, this year I decided to go on one dedicated photography outing each month. Due to COVID-19 I'm not traveling, as much as I would love to, but my intention is to explore the local area specifically with photography in mind. Ohio isn’t really known for it’s big landscapes, but there are some pretty places around, at least on a smaller scale.

Now I should say at this point that I have already skipped going out for photography in February because of the weather. As I am writing this, two days from the end of the month, it’s finally looking better, but everything has been covered with deep snow for the past several weeks which I’m just not personally too keen on going out in. Instead I plan to set up my equipment for some macro shots indoors and share this blog post about my last trip out.

Before the trip, I purchased a new backpack for my camera, because my shoulder bag starts feeling heavy pretty quickly and isn't even able to carry a tripod.

The bag I chose was the Lowepro Flipside Trek (affiliate link). I won't get in to the details in this post, but I will say the new bag significantly improved my experience. It was much more comfortable as well as being large enough to carry all my gear. I’ll share a full review of it in the future, so stay tuned.

I also planned my trip before actually going out, choosing a park and using satellite maps to pick places I wanted photos from, to give me some direction when I got there, which kept me from just wandering around aimlessly or feeling lost. Incidentally it was snowy that day too, and, for some reason, the parking lot near the area I wanted to photograph was closed, so I had to park on the opposite side of the lake and walk up probably 3/4 of a mile of bike trail. I could probably use the exercise anyway, though, and it gave me a chance to see how comfortable the bag was over a short distance. I was kind of picking through some snow, but it felt very secure on my back and didn't seem to be weighing me down, even with all my camera gear, a thermos, some binoculars and other little things, and a tripod strapped to the back.

To be honest, when I got to my location, I think I made a mistake right off the bat, which was to use my 18-55mm kit lens that came with my camera when I bought it. I grabbed it out of my bag because I didn't want to walk around too much in the snow, and using it instead of my 35mm prime lens would let me adjust the composition with the zoom. It seemed like the right decision at the time, but I had forgotten that I used to avoid using that lens because the images I get with it tend to always be a bit out of focus.

That being said, the weather conditions weren't ideal and it was my first time out, so my biggest focus was on having fun, which I did.

Ironically, though, the very first picture I took was on my phone, and it's probably the picture I'm happiest with:

The main thing I liked about this as soon as I saw it, and still like now, is that it's very minimal. The sky was pretty bright, and I turned up the exposure to make it fully white, the snow was white, and there's just this black tree and picnic area on the hill. It's simple and no nonsense.

I took this on my phone with the intention to photograph it again with my camera later, but by the time I got done with everything else I ended up sticking with this. Honestly, it's fine, though. There's not quite as many pixels there as I'd get from the camera, but otherwise there's really nothing wrong with this image.

From that point I walked down onto the little beach that they've made along the lake, and worked my away around that corner, stopping for pictures at different angles as I went. When it’s snowy like that, it’s important that you get all the pictures you want from one spot before moving any closer to your subject, otherwise you’ll get footprints in your shot.

With that in mind, this is the first composition I came up with:

Lately I've had my camera set to output both a JPEG and a RAW file. I'm a huge fan of RAW file formats, as I'm sure you'll see in the future, because they offer much more room for editing than JPEGs and other compressed file formats do. The downside, though, is that you almost have to edit a RAW file, because the camera doesn't apply any sharpening or other processing to it as it would a JPEG. Since sometimes pictures turn out well and aren't something I want to edit, I'm now getting both a JPEG and a RAW.

The image above is an example of how this picture looked straight out of the camera. It's noticeably very flat looking, rather too dark because I didn't expose it quite right in the bright outdoors, and not very sharp.

I'm also not a huge fan of the composition. The snow at was very thin, so there are a million little black spots at the bottom which I find distracting. I wanted to get the curve of the beach in the frame, but that meant including the grass on the left, which adds a lot of weight to that side of the image. The road adds a nice leading line on that side, but again, it adds weight to the left side. Meanwhile the right side is pretty empty. The trees were supposed to be the subject, but they feel like a far off background element. Not every photo is a winner.

With that said, the advice I'd give you today is to edit pictures even if you're not thrilled with them, unless they're just clearly not going to work. You don't need to put hours into them, but give it a couple minutes of your time, to at least see how it looks if you've corrected the color and lighting a bit, since the camera just isn't going to capture your vision of the scene.

After maybe five minutes of editing, this is the result. I still don't like the composition, this isn't going in my portfolio or anything. But it's a little brighter and a little sharper, the noise is gone, and the trees stand out as a subject better.

Essentially, I've added a bit of contrast and saturation, lightened the snow at the bottom, and darkened the sky at the top. Then I selected a broad area in the center and turned up the exposure, so the center of the image is a bit brighter than the edges. Chances are you probably didn't notice until I mentioned it, but that little trick draws your eye to the middle of the photograph, compensating for the bad composition a bit.

I tried a few more photos from that area, but I really wasn't that happy with any of them even on the camera, so I moved on.

As I walked farther down the beach, though, I found this branch that had washed up on shore from somewhere, which really seemed to grant some interest to what otherwise would have been a very uninteresting scene:

This is my second favorite photo from the day. I actually do like the composition of this one, the only thing I don't like is my choice of lenses. I had the 18-55mm lens zoomed all the way out to 18mm. That's not an amazing lens in the first place and lenses tend not to do as well at their extremes, so this photo just isn't that sharp.

I do like this composition, though. The sky is kind of moody for this shot, and the snow was very bright while the water was very dark, giving a nice contrast. The branch gives it a foreground element while the beach curves off into the background.

The camera wasn't quite level, which somehow gives the photo a more dramatic feel, and sort of points your eye down to the branch. I thought at the time that I actually wouldn't like this; when I noticed I leveled the camera and reshot the image. But actually the level version, which I'll drop in here, is much less interesting to me.

This next shot I wasn't sure about until I edited it, but now I do rather like it as well, although it's still not really a portfolio shot. This section of the beach is generally under water, but the water, which is controlled by a dam, was very low so I could just walk across here, which was an opportunity I didn't want to pass up even though it probably wasn't the most exciting place from a photographic standpoint.

The curve of the beach and the lighting really draw your eye up to the group of trees as intended, and the dark cloud in the sky gives the impression of maybe an oncoming storm, while the water looks fairly calm.

I like this as a square a lot as well:

With it cropped this way, the trees feel a bit more intimate and your eye focuses more on the right edge of them at the end of the beach. This is just one example of how a change to the crop of the exact same shot can make the whole scene feel different.

For my last photo I walked farther down towards the trees, but actually focused on the rocks that were along the shoreline there:

I wish that there had been a bit of mist or snow falling here to just fade out the trees in the background a bit, but I do like how this is divided into quadrants of light and dark. I was getting cold at this point and didn't quite get this composition as good as I really could have. That's how landscape photography is sometimes.

It's easy to pick through the pictures later and criticize them or only share the best ones, but being out there is real life. It's fun and calm and relaxing, but sometimes it's also cold, wet, or hungry. At this point in my trip I walked out to the trees, found a sheltered area, and drank some tea and relaxed a bit with my gloves on to warm up, and then walked back out to my car.

Overall the couple hours I spent out there were an incredible experience and I'll definitely be going out for more of this in the future.

Hopefully you all enjoyed this post! If there's someplace you think I should go, especially in Ohio, or a photography topic you'd like me to write about, you can send me a message through the chat in the lower right corner or on my contact page!

We have, at last, come to the end of 2020. A year in which there only seemed to be three months. A year in which time lost all meaning. A year in which many of us stayed at home nearly all the time. A year in which I went from checking my Google Maps timeline to see how many times I’d traveled around the world to thinking that pay by the mile car insurance might be a pretty good idea.

A year ago a blissfully ignorant Emmett was, for the first time ever, spending some time reflecting on the previous year and making plans for the new one. Denys Zhadanov, the Vice President of Readdle, along with a team of volunteers, had created a lovely worksheet designed to help you look back at 2019 to gain insight into what you liked and disliked in your life and how to improve, and then lay out goals in 2020 based on those reflections. They unironically titled the worksheet, “My Way 2020: The best year of my life!”

As laughable as it is now, this was how my year began: full of high hopes and carefully laid plans. It seems like forever ago now, but the first couple months went pretty well. I had identified travel as one of my favorite things from 2019, and by the end of February I had spent a long weekend in Florida and planned a vacation with friends to Colorado. And then March happened.

So, I’m writing now on March 305th to share my insights on the last year and the year to come.

Did I accomplish my goals for 2020? No. But that’s okay.

Some of my goals just couldn’t be accomplished this year. As far as those things are concerned, 2020 was kind of a wash. That doesn’t mean that those were bad goals, though, nor does it mean that it was bad that they weren’t fulfilled. Things happened this year that were bigger than me: the pandemic made many of my goals impossible or ill-advised. I wish that I could have done those things, but I don’t regret that I didn’t. I know I did my part this year to help end the pandemic, even though it wasn’t always super fun, and I can sleep well knowing that. And, even if the skeptics turn out to be right, and the coronavirus isn’t really that bad or some measure doesn’t work, I know I did my best with the best information available to me, and I’m happy with that.

Of all the things I learned this year, two stand out: take nothing for granted, and be willing to change your plans.

Ironically, I think we tend to take the phrase ‘don’t take things for granted’ for granted. It can mean both to fail to appreciate something and to assume that something is true, both of which are common in human behavior but were called into question by this year. We often fail to appreciate small or everyday things in our lives. When something big or new happens, it’s natural to feel excitement over it, but for something insignificant or common it’s understandable to have less of a reaction.

I tend to be easily bored and thus am a bit of a thrill seeker. This year, though, not much happened. To keep myself going, I had to train myself to be more interested in the smaller everyday things and place a higher value on them. For example, in April I set a goal of walking at least 2,000 steps a day, and made myself go outside and walk around. Otherwise, being in the house, I just wouldn’t have moved that much. But in the end daily walks were one of my favorite things from the year.

This, then, is my first piece of advice: if you can’t do something big, teach yourself to be happy about something small.

Many of us started off the year presuming that it was going to be great, that is, taking it for granted in the other form. Now, operationally I’m not sure it’s such a bad idea to assume that things will go well. If we assume that things won’t go well, we might just not begin them in the first place. At the same time, though, in my experience there’s usually a pretty good chance that things won’t go as smoothly as planned. As I have said, I had good goals for the year that couldn’t be accomplished. So how should we react when events beyond our control change our goals?

I think it’s okay for us to grieve the plans that didn’t happen, but it’s not good to dwell on that too long. Accept the changes. It’s okay to put things off for a while. After that, figure out how to play with the cards you are dealt, or as Gandalf told Frodo, “All that we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

This is my second piece of advice: if your plans get wrecked, keep your goals, set them on the back burner for a while, and then create new goals that are attainable.

I’ll admit that I did pretty well at sitting aside my goals this year, but less well at establishing any new ones or even completing some that were still possible. There are still things in my to do list that were due in June, in part just because I lost track of time so much that they don’t feel overdue. As Taylor Swift put it, “August slipped away into a moment in time, 'cause it was never mine.” Next year, I want to do better about owning the year, whatever it’s like, and keeping on top of my tasks and goals, even though the passing of time has become meaningless now that I rarely leave the house.

2020 wasn’t the year I wanted, but it’s the year I got, and I was very blessed in it. I was able to find enjoyment in the little things, stay safe, stay healthy, and keep my job; and I used some of my spare time for projects and hobbies. I don’t know what the new year will bring, but I’m trying again to make set some goals. But this time I plan to reevaluate my goals monthly and adapt them, so that whatever happens I can have a reasonable goal to accomplish without losing sight of the big picture.

Here’s to a better 2021.