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<\/p>\nEight years ago today, on August 18, 2010,\u00a0I published my first blog\u00a0post on Feathered Photography. It’s been a helluva ride.<\/p>\n
That first post\u00a0received very little attention and deservedly so.\u00a0It was poorly organized, not particularly well written and my text didn’t explain what was going on in my images very well. And of course nobody knew it was even out there (which looking back\u00a0was probably a good thing for my ego). I had no followers or subscribers, I wasn’t posting links on social media\u00a0and\u00a0at that point search engines like Google didn’t even know Feathered Photography existed so very few\u00a0people\u00a0ever saw\u00a0the post.<\/p>\n
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Eventually I\u00a0received a grand total of\u00a0two comments on that post with the first one coming from Richard Ditch, one of my early bird\u00a0photography mentors (in other words it came from a friend). The second\u00a0comment wasn’t made until eleven days later and\u00a0it was the last one I got.<\/p>\n
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With that first post I felt a little like this upside-down Short-eared Owl in an aerial dogfight with another owl.\u00a0I thought I’d bitten off more than I could chew and was in way over my head. I obviously\u00a0didn’t know what I was doing and even though I worked hard on that post I thought it accomplished very little, if anything. After all, if no one was going to see my posts, why\u00a0publish them at all?<\/p>\n
But it was a start and I stuck to it. For the first few weeks I didn’t post every day but as my readership very slowly grew (I know how many folks visit my posts from my blog stats) I\u00a0soon began to post\u00a0daily.\u00a0Over time I think my writing skills\u00a0improved significantly, often with help from friends and my readers themselves, and so did my photography skills – all of which brought in more viewers as time went by. And\u00a0more viewers\u00a0means more thought and\u00a0dialogue about birds and critters, about environmental concerns, about ethics in the field and about photography so I see it as a good thing for all concerned, including me.<\/p>\n
So here we are today, eight years down the road. In a few minutes when I\u00a0click on\u00a0the “publish” button for this post it will be\u00a0the 2,352nd Feathered Photography\u00a0blog post I’ve published (just typing that last\u00a0sentence reminded me of how much I struggled just to come up\u00a0with a name for my blog). Within those posts have been over 10,000 images\u00a0and my posts have been viewed 1.84 million times by folks all\u00a0around the world.<\/p>\n
To put that last statistic in perspective during my 33 year high school\u00a0teaching career I probably only had about 6600 students, give or take. The difference is I spent an entire school year with most of them.<\/p>\n
Thinking about all this has reminded me of just how much learning has been going on around here for eight years now and believe me I’ve learned as much as anyone. That makes this old teacher very happy.<\/p>\n
Take a bow, readers. Many of you with your knowledgeable and insightful comments\u00a0have contributed mightily to this effort. And I mean that.<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
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Eight years ago today, on August 18, 2010, I published my first blog post on Feathered Photography. It’s been a helluva ride.<\/p>\n