300 Livestreams!

Greetings!

Creative chromatic aberration

And thank you for getting us to livestream #300, this week! Can you believe it? Three solid years of twice weekly livestreams. No wonder I have amassed three file boxes jammed with notes! That is more single spaced writing than I accumulated in 4 years of medical school (almost twice as much!).

a wee grasshopper

I am not a big fan of change, but not caring for change is no excuse for avoiding needed course adjustments. Some feedback that I have been given over the last few days, makes it clear that you may be ready for some change. Let me summarize the issues that are behind the call for change, and after that I will present a few possible solutions, and explain how I plan to use our two livestreams this week to build a consensus about a solution.

Wave plate pyrotechnics

The issue will make sense to those of you who have been around over three years since I started doing livestreams twice a week. For the first few months, the livestreams were little more than social gatherings, during which I would answer questions, respond to your comments, and occasionally inject some more prepared content. This was a lot of fun, but seemed to get us away from the information-dense video content that this channel was built on. For that reason, I started working to bring you two solid blocks of quality content every week. I feel like I have been successful in delivering high quality  material most of the time. I like this format, because to talk on a given subject, without a pause, for 50 minutes, I have to know what I am talking about - so my preparations for each livestream can take several days - so this way of delivering content is certainly no less demanding than doing so with regular video content, it just stacks the work in front of the content instead of behind it (editing videos is the trade off).

Scotland

However, it has come to my attention that this way of doing things is not as good as I had thought. The issue is that some viewers have been frustrated by my inability to get to questions during many of these programs. I can certainly see how this might be irritating to someone who is following along and needs clarification on something I said before they are ready for me to move on with my presentation. So a suggestion was made that instead of presenting content live, a better solution might be for me to record the content ahead of time and play it back during the livestream. This way I could pause the playback to answer questions as they come up and engage with the audience while the content of presented. The idea was that I would present the same block of recorded content on both Tuesday and Thursday while being available to answer questions both days. While reasonable on its surface, this did not take into account that many of you attend both livestreams and would have no interest in hearing the same presentation both days. But it did get me thinking. The issue is real, and I do need find a way to do better in the future, and this is what I have decided to do…

Last one, I promise (these were all the same slide)

Later in this post I am going to lay out a few suggestions for changes in programming, some of which are minor and some of which are quite significant. I am going to ask you to look these options over and come to one of my livestreams this week to register your vote for the direction in which my programming will move. These are not set in stone, so if you have another suggestion, bring it on Tuesday or Thursday and I will give it full consideration. If you read this but cannot come to either stream this week, please send me a message through the Walls app (www.walls-app.com), to let me know what you would like to see changed going forward. One thing that I will not be willing to consider is any change that makes it inconvenient for my European friends to participate. I will consider single livestream options, if the time chosen makes sense for both my US and European audiences.

I do not think we will need to take up a whole livestream to deal with this, so I am going to use the remaining time to deal with some questions that have come up over the last week. On Tuesday’s Macro Talk I will  present an overview of focal length and sensor size in macro photography. The link to that stream is here -

https://youtube.com/live/fkXpXHkdlL0?feature=share

On Thursday, we will spend the first half of the stream considering the changes presented below and discussed on Tuesday. Following that I will be answering several other interesting questions that I have been asked in recent conversations. Your link to that stream is here - https://youtube.com/live/OdEuWqwCJ4s?feature=share

On Saturday we have AfterStack 27, and I believe Bud will be back to lead the discussion - I am not sure what he has for us this weekend, but I am sure it will be excellent!

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Before I forget, I will be out of the studio for a few days at the end of this month and I wanted to give you a heads-up that there will be no Tuesday Macro Talk on July 29 and no Macro Talk Too on Thursday July 24th or Thursday July 31st. I will also have to miss the Pzoom meeting scheduled for August 2, 2025.

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Below are a few suggestions for programming adjustments that I would like you to consider. I will be soliciting your opinions in both livestreams this week, but you can also register your choice by messaging me on the Walls-app, anytime this week:

OPTION 1: Don’t change anything - keep both streams every week and continue to deliver 2 different blocks of content each week.

OPTION 2: Record one block of content for playback during both Tuesday and Thursday livestreams (same content) with real time questions and discussion for the whole hour

OPTION 3: Cut back to one livestream every week (extended to 90 minutes) with content broken into segments to allow for questions and discussion in real time. Timing for a single event would need to be early afternoon in the US, early evening in Europe. This would free up enough time to produce  more regular video content.

OPTION 4: Don’t change the schedule (two streams a week, Tuesday evening and Thursday afternoon), but break the live content into several short segments with breaks for live questions and discussion

OPTION 5: I have a better idea ……. (Be specific!)

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Do you have any other ideas for how I could improve your experience on the channel? Let me know - I am excited about the next chapter of AW Photography. I’m also in this for the long haul, so it is important that I get it right. Please share your ideas with me and let’s see what happens next!