Explore Landscapes #50

Fifty! This is my 50th post on Substack. So, I thought I’d share some things I’ve learned along the way, what’s worked for me, and why I now feel confident about the next 50.

Fifty! This is my 50th post on Substack. I’m so pleased to be here with you all. I’ve been trying to get into the swing of posting to a blog regularly for several years. In fact, many years.

So, I thought I’d share some things I’ve learned along the way, what’s worked for me, and why I now feel confident about the next 50 posts.

This will be by no means a ‘how-to’ post. I’m not a writing guru. You’re not going to get rich anytime soon following my advice. I’m just a recovering engineer who is passionate about the outdoors, exploring with my camera, and shooting landscape photographs.

Over the last few years, I’ve taught landscape photography workshops to over 100 people - which, I think, probably still makes me a newbie.

I’ve tried various ways of providing a companion syllabus of bite-size lessons that my workshop attendees can access. This provides extra value to those attendees and helps reinforce what they learn when in the field with me.

In parallel, I wanted to make those lessons available to subscribers who had not attended a workshop. Previous attempts to do that have been clunky, expensive, and time-consuming, and I haven’t been motivated to keep them going after a few weeks of trying.

I also wanted to start writing a blog that gave my hiking, volunteering, or workshop adventures somewhere to live. And I wanted somewhere to share images that wasn’t subject to an algorithm that thwarted my potential audience from seeing my work.

This ‘perfect storm’ led me to Substack and to create Explore Landscapes.

As I said previously, I’m a recovering engineer, so I tend to be systematic in what I do. I like to plan. For everything. And anything.

What helped me the most was creating an editorial calendar (in Notion, which I love) and setting out titles and outlines for what I would write about each week. This was relatively straightforward for my Monday posts, as they’re typically long-form ‘teaching’ articles for paid subscribers and workshop attendees. I think of this as my workshop curriculum, so over the course of about a year, I’ll be breaking down the essential landscape photography knowledge and techniques into weekly bite-size chunks.

This eliminates the guesswork about what I will write each week. While I fully accept that this may be overly analytical for some of you, I find it reassuring to know what I’m writing about each Monday for the next six months.

I also find it helpful to start collecting images, references, diagrams, etc., before writing the post. I collate everything I need for a post into a single folder to know where everything is.

My free Thursday newsletter is typically about hiking, volunteering, or workshop adventures. It’s probably (hopefully) interesting to a wider audience, and I can be more relaxed and broader when choosing a topic.

I have a list of topic themes I ‘cycle’ through each month, such as book reviews, podcast reviews, hiking trail reports, etc. I also have a monthly post, ‘One Month -One Picture,’ which features a significant or memorable image I took the previous month. I pair those images with an image from the same month but five years ago.

However, if something else comes to mind to write about, I’m free to reschedule and be more opportunistic about what I post.

Many thanks to

Larry Cunningham (Larr2000) , John J Toth , Dean Campbell , Jenn Woltjen , Hannu Kokko , Dennis Nazarenko, and Gail Stewart for their paid subscriptions. I greatly appreciate your support.

When I started writing on Substack, I played so many mind games with myself before I’d put my fingers to the keyboard and write. I’ve still got a long way to go, but now, by and large, I sit down and force myself to get on with it. The anticipation of writing is always so much more difficult than actually writing.

It gets a little easier to start writing every post I write. Start with the first sentence, then the first paragraph, and add an image. Repeat.

I believe that you absolutely have to write for yourself. Write about what you want to write about. Not what you think your audience wants to read. It’s so much easier to write if you’re authentic. Don’t try to be something that you‘re not.

Thanks to

Pamela Leavey , Jacob Clarke , Casey Schreiner , Kim Corrall , Brenda Uekert , Jenn Woltjen , and Mike Smale for recommending Explore Landscapes.

So, there you have it. My thoughts on what I’ve learned from my first fifty Substack posts. Now, onto the next fifty!