September. The summer just ended ran through Shanghai’s dawn skyline, a month under Table Mountain, Dubai in furnace season, two weeks across China, VidCon in LA, the Engadin’s green July, home streets in Riga, and an August that stretched from London to the white rocks of Milos. Time to close the season properly, by looking at it honestly.
What This Half-Year Taught Me
First: staying longer wins. The month in Cape Town produced more, more footage, more stories, more actual understanding, than any three one-week trips this year. The math of slow travel keeps beating the math of collection, and my calendar is finally being rebuilt around that truth.
Second: the work matured. More of this year went into campaigns with real scope, treatments, productions, long-term brand relationships through Zahare Media in London and LA, and less into movement for its own sake. The For Brands series I started this spring came directly from those conversations; it turned out the process behind the content was a story people wanted told.
Third: 117 is a number, not a finish line. The count will keep growing, there are corners of Central Asia, West Africa and the Pacific with my name on them, but chasing the number stopped being the point somewhere around one hundred. The point is what each place gets turned into.
What’s Next
Autumn holds new campaigns, a return to the Gulf as the season turns, and, if the sketch survives contact with reality, that October run back to the Greek islands when the ferries empty out. The blog now runs on a proper rhythm again, and it’s staying that way: the archive of nine years of this life deserves a living front page.
To the brands who built campaigns with me this year, and the readers who followed the season from Shanghai to Sarakiniko, thank you. The camera bag is packed. It never really wasn’t.
