Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“In the New Year, never forget to thank your past years because they enabled you to reach today! Without the stairs of the past, you cannot arrive at the future!” ―
2024 was a helluva year wasn’t it? After all the turmoil of the past couple of years, I’m hoping you’ll join me in wishing that 2025 will be better one for all of us. Today I’m looking at the past year and making plans for some (slight) changes to the blog for 2025
How I Made this Photograph: I photographed my favorite tree in McCabe Meadows on a snowy day with a full-frame 47.3-megapixel Panasonic Lumix S1R mirrorless camera. The lens was an L-mount Sigma 35mm F2 DG DN Contemporary shot in Program Mode—it was cold!— exposure of 1/1250 at f/7.1 and ISO 320.
It’s a New Day and a New Year
A few years ago I made a decision regarding new directions for the blog. I started by increasing the number of posts I wrote from five to seven posts a week. Few photographic—or any other kind of—bloggers I know of maintain that kind of pace but I wanted to see how long I could do it. Well, I’ve been doing if for two years and I plan to keep doing it again in 2025. This year I added a new layer of Password Protected posts that are only available to my Patreon supporters, bringing the total of posts up to nine posts on some weeks! I sometimes get email—and your questions are always appreciated—asking how to get access to these posts. You can find the answers in several posts on this subject and here’s the most recent one. If you can’t find the answers you’re looking for, just click CONTACT* and ask me.
#MonochromeMonday will continue but not in its present, more rigid format. This past Monday’s post may gave you some hits of what it may look like and will give me the chance to experiment with images that appear in that day’s posts. At some point, I replaced #traveltuesday with #tuesdaythoughs. For 2025, #Travel Tuesday is back! Late in the year, I added #WheelsWednesday posts to feature automotive photography topics while my car photography blog is in a sort-of hiatus; the site however remains active. I plan to kill the Thursday Vibes posts with something. but I don’t know what yet, so it may become an “Anything Can Happen” Day for a while. Because of personal financial considerations and some things beyond my control my 2024 #FilmFriday posts have been hit and miss. I am hoping this will change next year and I plan to make it more active along with adding some other features going into the new year.
Last year, my weekend posts gradually shifted away from photography and photo business related posts, by departing from a pure photographic focus by first adding (every other) Saturday posts about Books. Joe’s Book Club, which occasionally features photography books. It turned out to be more popular than I imagined, so much so that I added a series of Joe’s Movie Club posts about movies on occasional Saturdays and I plan to continue that on an occasional basis next year. This series was modestly successful and I added a video version to my YouTube channel Joe Farace’s Videos, where it has garnered more attention than many of the car and photography videos I previously produced. If you like movies, please drop by. You may be surprised about how different my reviews of Blu-ray and 4K discs are from other YouTube movie reviewers.
In 2022, I began de-emphasizing portrait, glamour and studio lighting posts but recently added a new theme on Sundays about outdoor portraiture. In recent weeks the focus on these posts have moved to feature more glamour-style images and they have proven to be popular, so I plan to continue with that theme as long as I have some interesting images to share. I will not be posting any of these images on my Instagram account because these portraits while PG-13-rated (at most) might upset their censors who have a habit of banning and shadow banning glamour models and photographers. In the future, I may shift the genre of these posts to available light portraits with a similar focus on glamour and maybe boudoir. It all depends on you readers.
I want to gradually increase the amount of video content on my YouTube channel. Creating videos is a challenge for me because I’m a one-man band and am working with computers, editing software and equipment that other than the high quality microphone that was gifted to me by Barry Staver, could best be described as using “bear claws and rocks.” When it comes to still photography, the kind of photo gear you use not important to the quality of the images you can create. When it comes to video having the right gear has a large bearing on the quality.
Finally and most importantly, I want to thank all of you who visit this blog from time to time and wish all of you Happy and Healthy 2025!
*My Contact page is a standard WordPress form and if you use it you do not have to fill in all the blanks except your name and message. You do not, especially, have to fill in your phone number and if you do, I promise never to use it or sell it.
PS. I am currently looking for one new advertiser for 2025. If you own or work for a photo-related company and would like to advertise here, please click CONTACT and let me tell you about advertising. You will be surprised to learn how affordable it is and that even making one sale will pay for a whole year’s advertising.