When I started this blog at the end of September 2020, I mostly had one thing in mind, to give myself something to do. I’d been made redundant from my normal job three months prior and while I had decided to go full time as a photographer the blight of Covid and the ensuing lockdowns made going out and working difficult. Not helped by the fact my list of clients wasn’t exactly long as I was just starting out. By writing my blogs I dedicated time to my photography every week, practiced my writing, brought traffic to my site and if all else failed I had something to show an employer if they asked what I had been doing the past few months. From a standing start with zero traffic, my website now averages more than a hundred hits a day. That is something I am really happy and proud about.

With all that in mind, I am going to pause writing this blog. Over four years later my life is radically different. I am not only at a different place in my career but also living on the other side of the world. What I need to do and what I need to prioritise has changed and I’ve been spent a lot of time recently, thinking about what I need to do to push my life and career further in the right direction. For that I need more time which means something had to give and that unfortunately is my blog.

However, this is not the end. I enjoy writing and there’s so many things I want to share about my life and travels in Japan, what I’ve posted already is barely the tip of the iceberg. However, like a lot of other creators I don’t enjoy churning out content for the sake of it. In the more than two hundred blogs I’ve written, some I am really proud of and others I think are pretty meh. There were some weeks where I was more focused on just getting something out rather than writing something more profound, and ultimately that is just not a good use of my time anymore. It doesn’t leave me with a good feeling either. What I do write, I want it not only to be good, but I want it to evolve. In the future I want my blogs to be less chronological and more informative in the vein of professional travel writing.

I’m looking forward to having that extra day a week to be out shooting more, learning Japanese or just plain old living. Sometimes I feel like I’ve gotten very bad at the latter. If you’ve made it this far and taken the time over the years to check out what I’ve written then from the bottom of my heart, thank you. So much of our photography just sits on our hard drives and it’s been a great experience to share much of it with the wider world. More blogs will be coming in the future, but for now it’s time for a break. Until the next one.