Happy New Year 2017 – 52 Project

Well goodbye to 2016 (and good riddance from many of us) and hello to 2017!

2016 was a year filled with some pretty awesome highlights for me, combined with some not so fun parts. It was a time of re-assessing my businesses, refining the processes, removing some services and growing others. Some of the highlights for me included:

• Working on a project in Antarctica with Aurora Expeditions – mind blowingly awesome, can’t wait to head back there
• Travelling to Christmas Island, capturing some decent photos and meeting some awesome people
• Shooting the Sydney Vivid Festival from a helicopter.. at night, with the Canon 1DX mark 2 (awesome camera that I seriously want)
• A project in Central Queensland on a Cattle Station doing aerial photography and air to air photography (*love* this type of work)
• Working on a project with Tourism Western Australia and Jeep for an article that was published in Autocar Magazine UK & several other publications
• Working with Lush Digital on several projects with a few of their clients, this included trips to Esperance, Wave Rock, Kalgoorlie and a few other places
• Finishing the year strong with another trip to Cambodia to co-lead a team for The Giving Lens

On a personal level, it was a bit of a struggle to really find my rhythm in 2016, with some seriously long gaps between projects and quite a few projects postponed due to the downturn in the resource sector Western Australia. There was some great news though, we’re expecting Child 3.0 to arrive towards the end of Q1 2017. I reached the end of the year a little weary and was seriously thankful for the much needed break over Christmas & New Years. It is now New Years Day (Happy New Year!!) and I’ve spent the last week working on a strategy to grow the business and mapping out my business model.

One of the main flaws I’ve found is that I’m not really “owning” my own space on the web or at least not building on the place I own. I’m posting very regularly on my various social media channels and as a result they are all growing (3 Billion views of my work on Google+ and counting, 150K+ followers across my social media accounts), but I’ve not kept up with my blog and it has become a little stagnant. So in 2017 I’m challenging myself to a “52 project”, 1 post per week on my blog, whether I have anything amazingly interesting to post or not. Hopefully this will challenge me to find something inspiring and interesting to post as well as to clear the back log of posts from 2016 that I need to complete (Stories about Antarctica, Christmas Island, Iceland and a few other places).

This is the first post, I’ll be posting every Sunday or Monday for 2017 to make sure I’m always thinking about creating great content. Some people do a 365 challenge, posting daily, I don’t want to bore you all with me desperately trying to find something to post daily though.

To finish off this post I’m including a gallery of some of my favourite images from projects in 2016.