YouTube Vs Blog

Good evening everyone.

Hope you all doing fine and staying safe.
These hard times makes you think about some priorities.
Since a while a go I have the project to creat a YouTube channel about my days out shooting nature in Portugal. The thing is I’m not that great in front of the camera, and that makes me wonder, how about writing.

Do you thing is still worth it to write blogs or give it a try on YouTube and try to fight shyness and awkwardness?

Thank you.

Hi João - Before replying to your question, it would be helpful to know what your goals are. What would you want to accomplish and communicate with a blog or videos? I have stayed away from video until recently and now that I have done it more, I am a lot more comfortable with it. So, you might find that with time, you get more comfortable being on camera too. Blogging and video are totally different ways to communicate and appeal to different people. So, I think the answer depends a lot on what you want to achieve through either platform. And video is much more time consuming and technical than blogging, so it requires a lot more to get started.

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Hi @Sarah_Marino thank you for the reply.

The main goal is to show my country to the world. Portugal is a small (tiny?) country but it as a lot of beautiful forests, mountains and nature all around. I’ve always defended that we (portuguese) can see so much in-borders before going out and contribute to the local economy, but that’s just a whole different conversation.
The world is a magnificent place, but before exploring the rest I would enjoy to know my country from north to south and I’m sure lots of people would be surprised coming here.

I started photographing nature because of that. To show how beautiful my “backyard” is, and the YouTube channel or the blog would be the next step.

Again thanks,
Cheers

Either could help you accomplish your goal. A blog is a lot easier to start and requires a lot less work to put together as long as you feel comfortable with your writing skills. But, it is hard to develop a following for a blog. Individual posts can get attention based on SEO but getting a solid readership takes a long time and a lot of effort. YouTube, on the other hand, comes with a more built-in audience but video work takes a lot of possibly news skills, time, and technology. You could give both a try - like writing three blog posts and creating three videos - and see which option feels like the best fit for your skills and is reaching the most people. Given your goal, video might be the better fit but your reservations as mentioned in your first post might make that approach more challenging. You won’t know unless you try it out though…

One side note… My husband and I have written two location guides and we learned the hard way that there are consequences to sharing such info. You might find that your quiet, lonely places will be filled with people in a few short years if your videos or stories are wildly successful. Just something to think about as you go about your endeavors (framing topics more generally, for example, rather than sharing very specific location information).

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Video seems like a different medium than what you have been doing up to now, still photography. Would you be leaving photography for video? Is that a direction you want to take? I really don’t know but I think people do one or the other well. In my opinion you should decide which of the two you want to be serious about and put all your energy into it.

On the other hand you have stated that your primary goal is disclosure. Then I suppose viewership is the most desired goal. To that end I suppose video will get more views. Promoting your work may then be a more important skill than quality of the product.

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Very good point. I do intend to have some discretion while making the videos and analyse each situation. Some of the places I love to shot are on a natural reserve p.e. with very strick rules, those kind of places will requires some effort to share the “place” and the story but not the exact location.

If there comes a time when I couldn’t do both I will stop doing video, photography is what I love to do. Im just thinking about doing some video because still image and video can go hand to hand. Of course this is me talking with few field video recording experience.
But you make a really good point on having to divide the energy. I do see advantages on making a YouTube channel but I don’t want to reduce the time and energy I have to improve my still image. They can complete each other sure, but the time and effort is something to thing about no doubt.

Glad I have some spare time to think about this.

I’ve blogged for seven years, one post a week – https://forestandfield.blogspot.com/ – but, with a few exceptions have never disclosed a location due to watching lovely places become overused after they received publicity. I enjoy blogging but have never done a vlog post. If you want to combine a vlog and photographs, you might look at some of the older posts on this vlog for ideas – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOz7FjeZ5HnvM5rsNfyeEgA/videos?view=0&sort=dd&flow=list

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Thank you @woody1.
I’ll probably go with blogging for now, and now and then try to produce a vlog if the situation allows it.
Will try both with no pressure, but my writing could use some improvement and blog will do it so sure.
Thank you again and I will sure check out your blog.
Cheers

Very grateful you spoke up about the down side of travel writing and photography, Sarah. Many of us have felt the sting of success of our travel writing and photography.

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If you do choose to experiment with video in the future, it doesn’t necessarily require you to put yourself in front of the camera, and it doesn’t take much effort to get started. Several years ago, I tackled a passion project that required me to learn how to edit a video in about two days… iMovie on the Mac made that possible.

For a few years I recorded a fair amount of video on trips, mainly so that I could throw together compilations of clips and set them to music. No narration, but an easy way to show people the highlights from a certain area. I actually found that part of the process a lot of fun… I think the creativity involved on the video editing side is much more interesting than photo editing (while my feelings about shooting the two are reversed).

Ultimately, shooting video occupied too much of my attention. I didn’t want it to compete with still photography, which was ultimately more important to me. So I mostly gave up recording video. Now during self-isolation, I’ve suddenly found myself completing a couple of new video projects in the last couple weeks. A friend asked that I put together a basic wildlife-themed educational presentation for his son, so I went the YouTube route on that, and it may lead to similar videos on other topics while I’m trapped at home. So now suddenly I have some small regrets that I haven’t shot a bit more video in recent years (at least so I could have more stock footage to use)!

I would say that if you find you have some time while in the field, consider recording footage now and then, in case you find yourself wanting to delve into video down the road. You don’t need to use movie clips for YouTube productions, of course (think about how many stills are used in a Ken Burns documentary!), but you may find it handy some day.

Max

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For now that will be the plan, trying to write some blog articles to go with some of my images and record some stuff while on the field mainly weather events.

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