Seven years of the blog—upcoming changes and a test shoot with Jenny
It has been seven years since this blog began, although I knew I would start writing it many months earlier. Long before the launch, I wrote articles so I would have a large reserve ready. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that the format I had prepared was nearly impossible to produce every week. At the time, almost all my posts were detailed descriptions of heavily styled photo shoots. Every post therefore required a shoot, retouching, lighting diagrams, preferably some behind-the-scenes photos, and of course the written article itself. Detailed shoot breakdowns like these were rare then—and I think they still are—but I don’t publish them very often anymore either.
As I wrote last week, however, I’d like to return not only to describing shoots in greater detail, but also to writing about lighting and the equipment I use, after first getting some new lights and other gear. This is one of four upcoming changes; I’ll announce the others below. Instead of a long article today, there will only be a short note, accompanied by a test shoot with Jenny from Kazakhstan.
Jenny speaks more languages than I could remember, and understands several more—including Polish. We did the test shoot three days ago, but I didn’t have enough free time to prepare the photos for publication earlier. Today I’m posting only part of the set, all in black and white, although the shoot was larger and some of the images are in color. I’ll post the rest another time because today’s entry really is short.
The end of courses and products on the blog
I said I would write about the upcoming changes. Here is the second one. As a reminder, the first is my plan to return to shoot descriptions like the ones I used to publish, but I devoted an entire article to that recently.
Before the end of the year, the blog will be completely separated from the store and everything it contains. In other words, it will be like 2012 again: a blog and nothing else. The retouching course, contracts for photographers, Photoshop Actions, and the other products will disappear from here. The retouching course has grown too large to continue as a subsection of the blog, mainly because of the webinar archive. I would have to rebuild it completely to make that many videos practical to browse. I also couldn’t develop the course in the way I wanted, but the most important reason was different. I was simply missing many features that would be useful at the time and essential for the upcoming course about photographing faces. I still didn’t know when that photography course would launch.
For a long time, the plan was therefore to create a completely new platform that would be a hundred times better for both the store and the courses. Unfortunately, it was only now nearing completion. Below, for the first time, you can see what I meant, although the language versions were still misbehaving and the design needed work:
For people who don’t like black, the courses would also have a lighter mode. Certificates would appear, every completed lesson would be marked appropriately, and so on. In general, there were many changes, all for the better.
Remember that since October 15, my professional retouching course has been available at a huge discount that won’t last long. Anyone who still doesn’t own it can get it here. Every participant will be moved to the new platform for free as soon as it launches publicly.
Completing the rebrand
For four years there has been confusion because some people know me by my first and last name, while others know me by my brand. Soon I’ll do everything as Thomas Voland, and that’s how it will stay. I should have dealt with this long ago. The names of all my social media accounts are finally reasonably consistent; I still need to stop using the old email addresses and handle a few other details. As soon as the blog becomes independent, I’ll finish the rebrand.
Like many others, this shoot wasn’t done in a studio but in an apartment. As usual, I used a 135 mm lens on a full-frame camera. I did have to step onto the balcony for the photo above so I wouldn’t cut off a leg or the head, but the important thing is that I managed it :D. I could move the dining table somewhere else so the backdrop could sit almost against the wall—it currently rests against the table—but that would be more work than opening the balcony door, so my laziness won…
Refreshing the blog’s design
This was the second design of my blog. The first was very primitive and didn’t scale, so it didn’t work properly on phones. It looked like this:
A completely new responsive design was created in 2017:
In 2020, it would be time for another round of changes. This time they would be smaller: plenty of improvements and only a slightly modified appearance. Behind the scenes, however, it would require a lot of work and completely replacing the template then in use. The current design didn’t bother me, but I knew what I wanted to change and had already acquired everything I would need. The improvements would primarily cover the homepage, the right-hand column beside posts, the way photos were displayed, the portfolio, and several other things. I would do all of it only after separating the blog from the course and the store. Since we live in an age of reading on mobile devices and OLED screens are becoming standard, I also wanted to introduce a choice between light and dark modes, along with automatically displaying the version that matched the operating system’s color scheme. I didn’t know whether it would work well for my site—we would see.
When I wrote on my fan page about the blog’s seventh anniversary, I mentioned that setting up the lights for a single shot used to take me longer than shooting an entire session does now. I was completely serious, although of course it depends on the particular shoot. It isn’t that my sessions are incredibly fast now; they were simply very slow in the past :).
In summary
I warned you that today’s post would be short, so without dragging it out, here is a brief summary of the upcoming changes:
- Changing the studio equipment and returning to detailed descriptions of photo shoots
- Separating the blog from the store and training platform
- Completing the rebrand
- Improving the design
P.S. I had already written the next post, which would be completely different. I would probably publish it within a few days.