After months of thought, I'm excited to bring some new things to Improve Photography today. Â I explain all of the reasons and details in this post, but here's the short version.
- Improve Photography was going to delete the Facebook groups, but no more! Â I'm updating this post to change that decision. Â The group just means too much to too many people.
- We are moving our podcasts to one simple feed. Â If you're subscribed to the Improve Photography Podcast, you'll now get two episodes per week. Â One episode will be the regular IP Podcast but “improved,” and the other will rotate between Photo Taco, Tripod, Latitude, and Portrait Session each week. Â I think you'll like this change.
I'll explain the changes and thoughts behind them below, but first I want to sincerely thank all of you for your support. Â Making changes like this is never easy, but I believe it's the right direction to go. Â Thank you to those who can see the reasons behind it and how this will actually be a very good thing for you.
Why the Podcasts Are Moving to One Feed
The Improve Photography Podcast is one of the very largest and longest running and highest rated photography podcasts out there. Â I'm so grateful for the many thousands of people who support it by downloading and listening to our episodes. Â Sometimes I'm not sure why you all put up with me.
Improve Photography has also launched a number of other podcasts, like Portrait Session, Tripod, Latitude, Photo Taco, and the late Thoughts on Photography. Â The shows have all been successful but the pace of publishing has also spread us quite thin. Â There are things I'd love to do on the Improve Photography Podcast which I simply don't have the resources to do with all the other things I do.
Right now, Improve Photography and Photo Taco publish each week, but all the other shows publish only 2-4 weeks in reality. Â On average we're getting out 2.7 podcasts per week right now and sometimes they are hurriedly put together since all of the hosts are busy. Â Also, when we launch a new show like Latitude, we have to go on a months-long campaign to get everyone to subscribe to the new feed.
The change here is a simple one, which I think will be very positive for listeners. Â From now on, podcasts will only publish on the main Improve Photography feed. Â We'll publish two shows a week. Â On Monday you'll get an episode of one of our podcasts which will rotate between Photo Taco, Tripod, Latitude, and Portrait Session. Â On Thursday you'll get an episode of Improve Photography.
Thus, Improve Photography will cease to be a podcast network and will instead be one really awesome podcast that publishes twice a week. Â Episodes of the other shows (Photo Taco, Latitude, Tripod, etc) will now be branded as such. Â For example, we'll say “This is a Photo Taco episode of Improve Photography” instead of the show being “on the Improve Photography network.” Â I believe this will make the branding more clear and succinct.
The podcasts will be better than they've ever been. Â The SLIGHTLY reduced publishing schedule (down from 2.7 podcasts per week to just 2 per week) will open up enough bandwidth to do some cool things. Â For example:
- The Improve Photography Hotline! Â The conversation about podcasts won't be on Facebook anymore, so it'll continue right on the show. Â If you disagree with anything we say on the podcasts, want to ask a question, or you just want to comment on something happening in the photography industry, you can call in and leave a message. Â A new segment of the Improve Photography Podcast will be “The Hotline” where we play YOUR thoughts and commentary. Â This will make the show more interactive and thought-provoking. Â The hotline is ready right now for your thoughts and calls. Â Here is how to send audio to the hotline–you can send your thoughts right now for next week's show.
- Fewer Ads. Â I'm also cutting down on the ads so we can have more time for the good stuff. Â Right now we do up to four ads per episode, and that is changing to a maximum of 3 ads per episode. Â With a target length of 45 minutes per episode, that means no more than 4% of the podcast is advertising. Â Compare that to network TV which has an average of 24% advertising time. Â The ads on Improve Photography have never turned a profit. Â They really only pay for the expenses incurred by the podcast such as paying my assistant to do the publishing, as well as giving the ad broker their cut and hosting, post-production software, etc.
- Better Research and Prep. Â I hate the feeling of hurriedly throwing together a podcast episode 20 minutes before recording. Â I feel a lot of responsibility to you all who trust me with your time. Â With this new schedule, I can now carve out a significant chunk of my day to prep for each podcast and ensure it's worthy of your download. Â Each show will be better produced and have better content. Â I'm setting a higher bar for what podcast episodes will be published.
- More Interviews with Industry Experts. Â I almost never do interviews on Improve Photography. Â We've only had 3 interviews in the last 75 episodes. Â Some interviews are boring. Â “I started photography back in the film days… yada yada yada…” Â But when interesting news stories are happening in the industry, I want to cover them deeply. Â For example, when a new camera is released, I want to be certain we have someone on who has been shooting the camera as a beta tester so you can spend your gear dollars well. Â Similarly, when I find people releasing a thought-provoking book on composition or photography as art or whatever, I'd like to have them on and pick their brains. Â With this new schedule, I can do that.
To be clear, all you need to do to get all of the updates to the podcasts is to be subscribed to the normal Improve Photography Podcast. Â Everything will come on that feed from now on.
Lastly, change is happening to Apple Podcasts which were announced last week at WWDC. Â It looks like Apple is finally bringing some features to podcasting which podcasters have wanted for many years. Â I'd like to make these changes now to take advantage of a medium which seem to be growing lately.
More Updates
Tomorrow (Tuesday, June 13), I'm going to the airport in Boise Idaho.  What country will I be photographing?  I have absolutely no idea.  I had my awesome assistant Jesse book me a plane ticket to a country without telling me where I'm going.  I'm going to show up to the airport, read the ticket, and get on the plane with absolutely zero prep.  Each day during the trip, I'll be posting a photo and you can all guess where I am.  After the trip, I'll be posting a series of 8 videos on the Improve Photography Youtube Channel–one for each day of the trip so you can watch my disasters (probably) in travel photography 🙂  You can follow the adventure by checking ImprovePhotography.com each day where I'll post the picture, and subscribing to the Improve Photography Youtube channel for the videos.
I have now spent over a year working on the Really Good Photo Spots app. Â I anticipated a release in March, then April, then May…. ugh… But it's ALMOST ready for launch. Â I'm doing the best I can, but this was a harder project than I anticipated. Â I sent out a beta copy to 46 testers last week and we discovered 3 last bugs that needed to be squashed. Â Today I sent out a release candidate to the testers and if there are no further bugs, we'll be ready for launch. Â Keep your fingers crossed!
It’ll be sad to see the Facebook groups go. It was a bit confusing having different groups for each podcast though because there were a few duplicate posts between them. Please keep the IP Retreat 2018 group alive, it shouldn’t be too hard to manage because it’s significantly smaller and you can whitelist by email address of attendees.
I’m excited to see the upcoming videos of your trip. Hope you have a great time! (Although you should definitely keep New Zealand in mind for next time and not exclude all the left-driving countries).
Hopefully the podcast changes are for the best. It would be great to hear more of Erica and Nick, although I’m sure they’re quite busy with wedding season. Also Ricky Stern and Sharky James have been my favourite guests.
Not keen on the forum. Would happily join a Slack group.
That group is staying alive.
I enjoyed the fb groups plenty but I can see your point of time/spam etc. looking forward to the forums and/or slack. And good news on the podcast front. Keep the quality up and give the publishers time to do right. Reading ALL the comments here on the site is clunky with the lengthy scrolling . The comment section I can’t see being the answer in its current form….
Thanks for all you do. It’s great! Don’t listen to the haters
Understand the choice, personally never liked Facebook and the IP groups were more than half the reason I spent time there. I will not miss it! Would really like to a forum or slack type of place where we can still get help from each other as that was in my mind the best thing going on there. I cant tell you how much I appreciate what I have learned here and through the podcasts. I am excited to see where IP goes next!
Great decision Jim! Your comment that Facebook only provides “a broken system for fragmented conversation” is spot on.
A media studies university friend of mine describes Facebook as somewhere in between ‘poison’ on the one hand and a ‘black hole that sucks time’ on the other.
Much better to have fewer, authentic, focused people contributing – rather than a mass of passers by that contribute zero. You will also save yourself a huge amount of time by not having to sweep up after the robots have visited. That is precious time that can be spent creatively. All power to you my friend.
Jim – I think you are spot on by pulling out of Facebook Groups. I just dropped my page too. Consolidating the podcasts makes SOOO much sense! I might finally get a chance to catch up on all of them now.
One request – could you pretty please put up a search feature on th IP website? I’m buggered trying to find specific articles.
Thank you for all you do for the photography community – one can tell your heart and soul are in this.
Hey Karen,
Thank you for your support and kind words. We’re still working with the site and figuring out the search option again. You can in the meantime locate articles thru google by just including the topic and Improve Photography after the subject. This might help narrow down the search options.
Great to hear this! I just joined IP+, and it did seem that the bulk of the action was still taking place on FB. Look forward to a lot more activity on the IP+ community now.
I can totally understand your decision but I must say I find it sad to see the Facebook groups go. It was always entertainment and fun to discuss with the IP community and I will surely miss that.
As someone who’s been using many fora for decades I can tell you it won’t be a good idea to start a new one. Most of them are either dying or already dead and are inconvenient to use on mobile devices (phones and tablets), which is a requirement nowadays. Don’t know any good alternatives but maybe, as others already mentioned, Slack might be an option.
I also don’t think the hotline will work, just look at the petapixel podcast voicemail widget that is hardly used. But I agree something to give feedback or discuss the podcast would be nice.
Yeah, Jim. I’m kind of sick of Facebook in general anyway. This will all work out. Give it time. Thanks for all of the valuable info on your site. Good luck!
Hi Jim – I made a suggestion to Nick Page last year that it would be a great idea to get one central forum for all landscape photographers to be able to participate in around the world. Erin Babnik is currently running one on her web page, but unless you head to her page, you would never know about it. If someone with your visibility were to get something like this off the ground and organize it by region, I think it could really take off while hopefully adding ad revenue to IP along with increased visibility of your site. Maybe tie it into your new app? I think it would help us to network with other photographers as well as be a resource to help us plan shoots that aren’t in our neighborhood (Are the waterfalls flowing in Yosemite in September, have the larch trees turned yet in Alberta, etc)
Ultimately, it might be cool to have a unique forum address that can exist separately from improve photography, just to be welcoming to pros and beginners alike. Erin’s forum title is “Think Outisde”, which I think is brilliant. If you had a unique address, it could still be hosted on improve photography. I also like how Landscape Photography Magazine is offering professionals access to a page of their own to offer workshops in their new forum.
Just some ideas to mull over as you take a step back from Facebook. Charging that much to boost a post is unconscionable.
I’d like to see the newest comments at the top – that way I don’t have to scroll thru all the comments I’ve already read (and sometimes there are a lot of them!) to read the ones I haven’t.
Wow, now I can participate if I want to. I do not use Facebook and (well let’s not say never will).
On another note, ?what happened to the search tool.
Looking forward to the changes and the new app.
I have only one minpr complaint, I feel IP is way too CaNikon concentric. As a MFT shooter i feel totally left out at times.
HOLY CROP that’s a lot of scrolling to add a comment.
Hey Jim could I suggest locking the “add a comment section” to the top of the comments and have the comments in descending date order so the most recent are on top.