I Went Quiet For a Month. The Videos Didn't.

Sorry for that, I owe you an honest update, not an excuse.

It’s been a month since my last post here. Not because I stopped working, but because everything went into my recent travel series, and the newsletter got left behind. That’s the reality I seem to be facing every week while attempting to keep all of my personal projects running on my own. As a full-time commercial photographer, there are often times when I have to focus on client work. That limits the other 40+ hours a week I have the ability to put into my personal endeavors.

I'm learning that specialty videos like this travel series require much more time than anything else I've ever produced. Not only do the scripts, audio, and video editing take a tremendous amount of time, I am learning as I go with regard to using the software.

Something always has to give, and lately it’s been this.

So today I’m catching you up on all of it. Three videos are already live. A fourth one, a place I’m still thinking about, goes up tomorrow.

Madrid, Toledo, and Segovia. This one is where the whole series started for me. A Roman aqueduct still standing in the middle of a living town, a plate broken on purpose at dinner, and a city where the light has looked the same for two thousand years. If you want to know why I call myself an artist who travels instead of a travel photographer, this video is the answer.

Gothic cathedrals to underground wine cellars. Burgos, Lerma, and the small Rioja villages most people never make it to. Briones, Sajazarra, a family bodega that has nothing to do with the tourist wine trail. This one’s about how landscape changes personality depending on the hour of light you catch it in.

Two cities forty minutes apart that could not be more different. One rebuilt itself through architecture. The other never had to. This is also when I decided to change my weekly video upload to Fridays. Now all new episodes land Fridays at 1 PM Central instead of Wednesdays.

Santander, the Altamira cave paintings, the medieval town of Santillana del Mar, quiet Avilés, and Cudillero, a Viking-founded harbor town that might be the most beautiful place I’ve ever pointed a camera at. Overcast light, a village that runs on its own pace, and an honest story about a long-exposure shot I lost because I forgot the one rule I know all too well, always bring the tripod.

I’ll drop the link here as soon as it’s live, but you’ll find it on the channel tomorrow afternoon.

Every video in this series links to my free field guide, Stop Shooting, Start Seeing — using the special I've included at the end of each video. If you want to plan your own trip through any of these places, my travel affiliate page link is in every video description, and my Amazon shop has the gear I actually used to shoot this series.

Free Field Guide — Stop Shooting, Start Seeing (get it for free with the special code at the end of each video!)

My Affiliate Travel Page — Explore These Locations and more!

My Gear — Amazon Shop, see what gear I use and much more!

Three more videos are coming in this series, every Friday at 1 PM Central through the end of July. And once I catch my breath on the video side, I’m bringing the matching blog series back to my photography site so the next newsletter won’t just be a video recap. It’ll have those posts to point you to as well.

I’ve gotten some feedback on my Spanish in this series. Specifically, that I’m butchering it. I do not speak Spanish, FYI!

Fair enough. I’m a southern English speaker with an accent thick enough to get lost in translation all on its own, plus a speech impediment, sounding out these words from online pronunciation guides that are often not great. I found out watching Video 3 back that I’ve been saying “Bilbao” wrong the entire time. Even after putting notes down and reminding myself of the proper pronunciation lot of these places, I've burned into my mind incorrectly. Can’t go back and fix any of that now. It’s part of the record.

Somebody also told me I shouldn’t be talking about places I can’t pronounce or fully understand. I’m taking that with the grain of salt it deserves. If I’ve gotten a word or a detail wrong, that was never meant as disrespect, and I’m sorry if it landed that way for anyone. But I’m not going to stop making this series because I’m not fluent in other languages. I’m an artist telling you what these places did to me through a camera. That’s the whole job. Accent and all.

Thank you for sticking around during the quiet month. Stay ready. That is all. Just stay ready.

— Sheri