It’s been a while since I last updated this blog.

2023 was a big year of change, growth and life transitions. Some planned and a lot unplanned. Some good and some not so good. But all in all, there were many things to be grateful for. The fact that I’m writing this blog post in the comfort of my new home is a privilege in itself.

I even considered shutting down this blog in 2023 since I haven’t had a lot of time to commit to it. But then a big life change happened…. we’ve moved quite literally across the world to another country in the second half of 2023. More specifically the United States.

There’s a lot of unpack there (figuratively and literally), but I’ll keep my Year In Review focused on the theme of this blog — travelling and photography.

The last 6 months has been hectic to say the least. Moving to another country as an adult is a mix of challenges, stress, but also excitement and a sense of new adventure. It’s shaken up the normal routines of life and career trajectory I was on in my day job.

Our first 6 months in the United States was filled with mundane life admin tasks of finding a rental, finding furniture, buying a car, opening bank accounts.

All the way to more exciting activities like travelling to new cities, making new friends, exploring new passions and just having more headspace for things I didn’t really have a lot of time for juggling a busy career and other life commitments.

I’ve read a ton more books, travelled to a few more places, done some online courses to build some new skills and following my curiosities exploring the Pathless Path.

I decided to keep this blog up now that we’ve moved countries and we plan to (hopefully) do more travelling. I want to use the blog as a way of getting back into sharing my passion for photography, travel and perhaps some expat living content too.

It’s been a bit of an eye opening and wild moving from Australia to USA… more differences than one would imagine!

At the very least, this blog will serve as documentation for our once-in-a-lifetime experience of living in the United States.

I’ve been doing an annual review and plan post (no matter how belated it is!) on this blog since 2016. If you’re interested, my previous year in reviews can be found here:

• 2016
• 2017
• 2018
• 2019
• 2020
• 2021
• 2022

Even though it’s now March 2024, it’s never too late to review the year that’s been, take stock and plan for the future.

2023 year in review:

Blogging

I literally only published 3 blog posts in 2023. Yet my view count was more than I expected!

Being curious minded, I decided to dig deeper into the data and analytics.

Despite being very inactive in 2023, my total view and visitor count in 2023 was higher than previous years. Especially if you compare year to year since I started the blog in 2016! Perhaps it’s SEO at work? When I look at my Traffic Sources to travellinglens.co website Search Engine (specifically Google Search) brought in 6219 views.

If I want to take photography blogging and online writing seriously, learning SEO is definitely something to look into in 2024.

Unsurprisingly the visitors for the website in 2023 were largely from Australia and USA.

Based on the analytics the top 4 blog posts that people landed on when they visited my blog were:

1. My initial impression and review of Wandrd Roam Sling camera bag
2. Flight Diary: Qantas Airbus A330 Business Class (Sydney to Perth)
3. Review of Blurb Book Layflat Photobook
4. It started with the Fujifilm X-T10, My journey with the Fujifilm X series

This tells me it’s the review articles that gained the most traction (presumably because they’re helpful to others). Something I should write more of in 2024, as I do like to deep dive into reviews.

Looking into my WordPress analytics for 2024 as part of my annual review was a pretty interesting exercise. It also reinforced that it was a good thing I didn’t shut down the blog.

Travel

2023 has been a year of a lot of local trips in Australia. The first half of the year, especially after we knew we were moving to the United States, we focused our travel on hanging out with friends and family as much as possible, knowing that we won’t be seeing them for a couple of years.

Penang, Malaysia

The year kicked off with Chinese New Year in Penang, Malaysia. As always lots of great local food and hanging out with relatives and family.

Adelaide, Australia

It’s been almost a decade since I’ve been to Adelaide. This was a 5 day trip with my parents to explore Adelaide since it was the first time they were visiting.

The trip involved lots of food, wineries and walking. A fairly low key and relaxing trip.

Dunsborough and Margaret River, Australia

Actually headed down south to the South West region twice, on two separate family trips, when we had family visiting from overseas.

Can’t complain, the South West is one of our favourite places to visit, relax and check out our favourite haunts like Voyager Estate, Miki’s Kitchen and Yahava Coffee.

Mandurah, Australia

Just before moving to the United States, a bunch of friends and us decided to do a quick trip out of Perth to Mandurah. Really it was just a chance for us to hang out, eat, chat and play board games for a last hurrah.

Knowing that it’ll be a long while before we can do something like this with them again.

San Antonio & Fredericksburg, Texas

Our first taste of travel after we had moved to the United States was heading up to San Antonio and Fredericksburg over a long weekend. It was during the peak of summer so the weather was blisteringly hot!

We got our first taster of the amazing highways in the United States that are built for road trips and long drives. San Antonio was a fantastic little city to explore. The River Walk was lovely. The Natural Bridge Cave and Wildlife Ranch were surprisingly great places to visit too.

Fredericksburg is the heart of Texas Hill Country, home to 50+ wineries.

Houston Space Centre, Texas

This was a fantastic place to visit. It was great to learn about the history of space travel and be in the same mission control room that managed the Moon Landing of 1969.

Kemah and Galveston, Texas

Galveston is know as the beach side getaway city for Texas.

Now, not trying to throw shade on Texas… but the Australian beaches are wildly better than any beach you’ll find in Texas. It has made us appreciate the amazing Australian weather and beaches a whole lot more.

San Francisco, California

San Francisco has definitely been the travel highlight of 2023. The famous hilly cities. The colourful, quaint and pretty old Victorian terrace homes. The zig-zag street. The infamous Alcatraz prison. Cycling across the beautiful Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito.

The food and coffee! They had a range of delicious cheap eats all the way to 1, 2 or 3 Michelin star restaurants.

New Orleans, Louisiana

Jazz clubs, Bourbon Street, picturesque plantations (albeit with a very dark slavery past), and delicious iconic food. A must visit city. It’s grungy city full of character and a rich Louisiana history.

Cancún, Mexico

Cancún is commonly known as the Bali of the United States.

In other words, it’s a tourist hotspot for American. The opportunity came up to join a bunch of friends to get some R&R at Club Med Cancún. It was an easy yes especially at 50% off standard resort rates since it was low season for travel to Mexico.

Austin, Texas

We headed to Austin twice in 2023. Once to watch the Austin F1 at the Circuit of the Americas, and another long weekend to explore Austin city itself.

Austin is a city I would be happy to return to multiple times. It’s a very walkable city with fantastic food.

Photography

According to my Adobe Lightroom catalogue, I took 11,000+ photos in 2023!

Above is just a small snippet of the photos I did take. Of course not all of them are keepers. I was taking photos more than I had time to edit and share them. It’s not a bad problem to have.

It means I’ve had the opportunity to explore and travel more than I had time to process the photos.

And at the end of the day, living in the moment should be the priority over hunching over a computer to edit photos. In addition to travel photos, I also did a number of fun client projects and collaborations.

My favourites shoots are the documentary style Personal Branding photography shoots.

I also did a few fun collaborations that I really enjoyed. One with Adobe Express. Another with a local camera shop, Camera Electronics, where I got early access to the Fujifilm X-S20 camera and did a video interview of my experience with the camera with them.

I would have loved to have hosted more Fuji X Aus photo meetups in Perth before I had left, but I’m glad we managed to squeeze a couple in between our Perth admin Gus an I.

Plans for 2024 and beyond

Here’s what I’m thinking at the moment.

Plans 1 to 3 I’m excited to commit to. But the rest of it will come down to how much time I have available, since I still have other priorities outside of photography and this blog.

1. Restarting this blog

Over the last 3 years I really discovered joy in the writing process and story telling through images.

As I’ll be living in a different country for a little bit and intend to take the opportunity to do more travel around North America, I would love to restart this blog to share more travel stories, reviews and helpful content, as well as a way to document this unique time of our life living abroad.

I haven’t set myself a particular blogging frequency since I still have other commitments outside of this hobby of mine. But I do need to work out a way such that each blog post isn’t such a “heavy lift”, which in turn would help with getting more posts out there.

2. Do more travel and photography related reviews

I’m a bit of a detail orientated person who loves to research. So doing more travel and photography related reviews that is helpful to other photographers and travel enthusiasts really resonates with me.

I may as well turn all that research and knowledge into something useful!

We have more travel ideas and destinations that we would love to visit, than we have time and money for! But a few key places that’s on our bucketlist for 2024 are:

• France
• Chicago
• Caribbean Island(s)
• Maine for fall colours
• A road trip through Utah and it’s famous National Parks
• A road trip through in West Canada, covering Jasper, Lake Louise and Banff.

3. Travel and Points Hacking

Travel and point hacking is something we do where we can as a way of making sure every dollar we spend gets us further. So this would be something fun I would love to write and share with readers.

Again I’m already doing the research and analysis, so why not share it!

4. Share more photos on social media

I’m always inspired by the amazing photos I see on Instagram but I haven’t personally had much time to share photos on that platform.

I have a massive backlog of photos to edit and use to tell photo stories, so getting back onto a social media platform like Instagram or Threads (Is that still a thing?) would be fun to do.

More specifically, I would love to connect with other photographers again online and in person for the pure joy of sharing and enjoying photographs. That’s one of the reasons why I always enjoyed participating in or organising photowalks in Perth.

5. Sharing expat life experiences

As we’re living as expats in the United States, it might be interesting to share some thoughts and experiences on living as an Australian expat.

It’s a way to document our experiences, but it might also be helpful to other Australian who are living in the US as an expat, thinking about it or just plain curious.

6. Experimenting with Substack newsletter platform

If I do get back into a regular posting schedule for this blog, I would love to experiment with a newsletter platform like Substack to send out monthly recaps, and photography and travel related content I find along the way.

7. Create a Notion Workspace system for photographers

I’ve been a long time user of a productivity and all-in-one workspace app call Notion. I’ve been using it for the last 5+ years to manage my client photography projects, collaborations, blog posts, tasks, notes, personal life and more.

It’s my digital second brain that’s helped me juggle my professional working life, side hustles, hobbies and personal life.

I’m a bit of a productivity, organisation and Notion nerd. So the pipe dream would be to create a Notion system to help other photographers and creatives do get organised and productive using a tool like Notion (if there was demand for it).

Wrap up

2023 has been a bittersweet year, with many endings and a number of new beginnings.

Still, there is a lot to be excited for in 2024 and I’m grateful for the rare opportunity I take some time out of my career to explore other areas of life.

The bottom line for this blog is that I’m keen to shift the blog more towards a educational travel and photography content, and use photo storytelling complement that.

That’s a wrap!

See you soon

J.