Suffice to say, it’s pretty mind blowing to be watching the TV with Sir David Attenborough narrating over your footage, and then to see the aftermath of the country gently falling apart watching the Albatross struggle we documented, I can promise you it was a hundred times more heartbreaking filming it and not being able to do anything.
A quick catch up to start!
Well, I've always wanted to have a nice and 'together' multi faceted website, and so a few years of learning & developing later here I sit. Having now given up on the promises of the benefits of learning to build sites from scratch, I'm at last safe in the hands of Square space!
To cut a long story short, this finally means I have this! A blog! Something I've always wanted to integrate in a nice easy way. I came from building my last site from total scratch on an Adobe platform called 'Muse', as at the time it offered so much more flexibility and an open book of options, especially compared to the fairly limited array of templates and tools Squarespace had.
Some of the clickable banners, all made from scratch in photoshop to sit on the 'photos' title page in my old website. Mega faff, but sometimes if you want the creative freedom it's what you gotta do.
When I began back then too, I was super concerned about displaying EVERYTHING I'd shot, all the photos, all the videos, so as not to limit peoples perceptions of what I could shoot and risk losing out on work. However, time (and wise friends, thank you) have taught me and my ADHD attitude that less really is more, and my busy mind is at last finding peace in a kind of digital cleanliness.
Whilst Muse was very flexible and omnipotent it also provided me with more than enough holes to fall down as well, and so I spent much less time being productive and creative, and much more time just trying to make the site display on a variety of screens and to actually hold my content in a cohesive way. Something I barely barely managed...
A crushing lack of 'tool knowledge' (Illustrator & Muse) led to mostly fighting with photoshop to create some rather ugly and unuseable title pages, rather than nice clean malleable assets... those white lines are just rubbed out over the top. Nasty!
So, here's to new and creative beginnings.
I am forever shooting photos & videos that aren't quite 'good enough' or of the right style to fit my main online platforms, or that only work in the context of a blog or as a story sequence, and I'm super happy to have that now.
I'll be using this little quiet corner of the internet of mine for 'behind the scenes' on my filming & photo shoots when I can, tutorials, tales of the adventures I'm lucky enough to head out on (E.G. my upcoming expedition in Sweden which will be covered bit by bit, including some lead up content on here!), and other little things I'm passionate about in the worlds of music, science, environment and suchlike.
A shot from an unpublished story about a sea cliff we climbed on a remote island in Scotland, mid-winter, just because I didn't have a platform to share it well on! Well... it's coming soon!
Having said that, you can expect this to mostly be wildlife, eco, adventure & travel oriented... I'm always well up for this being a conversation, as per my youtube ethos as well, so chat away in the comments, let me know what you're interested in, my brains are open for the picking.
Until the next one, whenever that maybe be, thanks for reading!
Olly x
One of my best friends, and mad honorary scotsman (he's a welsh german in reality... I think?) Zeemon, off onto the 'wee hill' that is Ben Nevis, BTS from a wintery shoot a couple of years back. I'm sure he'll be featuring heavily soon...