Blogging

Strange Lands has been around for just over 3 years now. It didn’t start out as a travel photography blog, but as time passed and I became more immersed into the world of HDR, I changed the blog to reflect my photographic passion. Now, with my Daily HDR blog, I’m posting new photos every single day and have established myself in the world of HDR. For those of you wanting to start your own photography blog, where do you begin? And how can you make yourself seen among the many photography blogs out there already? First of all, you need a domain name, web hosting & a blogging platform. The best and most popular out there is wordpress.org. For a step by step guide on setting up a blog, see here. Next you need to get familiar with wordpress and choose a...

When you first start a blog, it’s a glorious day when you begin to get comments. You realise that a human has actually read your words, and was influenced enough to write a note in return. Then the spam bots find you. These are preprogrammed by some distant mastermind to leave generic comments on sites in order to promote their own sites/clients. These comments have nothing to do with your article usually. Naturally they never see the light of day on our sites. Navigate down to the bottom of the post to see the best of these (in italics). Then, when your readership grows, you begin to reach enough people that you eventually offend one or two. These are the interesting ones because in real life, we rarely have confrontations with others where strong words are...

I could well be a big travel blogger one day, and by big I mean fat. But I doubt I’d ever break into the ranks of the ‘elite’. It’s not as difficult as people make out. All you need is to have a lot of time, plenty of stuff to talk about, and to not spend too much time on the road. You may be thinking ‘Jim, you write like a dyslexic 1 year old and your photos look like vomit, that’s why you’ll never be famous.’ You may also be right. The fact is, most travel blogs are pretty much the same. There are certain rules that ‘should’ be followed in order to be ‘successful’. For example, overly personal blogs don’t work. No one wants to read about your life, unless they’re your friends and...

Photography has become a major part of my life – anyone who has followed my blog for any length of time will know that. I do it for the sheer pleasure of it. Strangely enough, the camera hasn’t simply been a way for me to capture and show the world my imagination, but it has pushed me to do things I would never have considered before – like sitting on the edge of one of the most active and deadly volcanoes in the world at 5:00 am. Previously, like a good little English lad, I tried not to stick out like a sore thumb – a difficult task in Asia, I know. But now, I scour the streets and countryside alike with my tripod unfolded in search of something captivating. Photography has pushed my confidence to a level I wasn’t sure I had. Last...

Being a blogger, I love to read other people’s travel blogs. Mostly I’m just nosy, but over the past few months a handful of blogs have shone through for me. The problem with blogging, or anything else for that matter, is publicity. You can have the most incredible adventures, offer stunning pictures, and pen extraordinary stories, but if you don’t publicise your stuff it’s just debris floating in the sea. Generally the blogs I read are not only interesting, but their authors work hard to get them out there. Up until now Rachel and I have done almost zero in the way of marketing our blog. We need to take a leaf out of their book. Balancing the time between language learning, trying to live an exciting life, and working full time on multiple sites, isn’t...