What I’ve been up to

I’ve recently being feeling very fortunate that I enjoy my day-to-day work. Even when I have free time, I often find myself writing, blogging and checking out interesting developments in the content marketing and social media space.

Mostly as a reminder to myself, I want to start highlighting some of the work I’ve been producing and what I enjoyed about the process.

So here goes:

1. Writing for On the Patio:

For the last few months, I’ve been producing content for the On The Patio blog, Around the Table. This local e-commerce site is focused on outdoor living and I’ve been covering everything from food and decor to interviews and DIY.

It’s fun to write in a more informal style and it’s been a chance to flex my writing muscles in a more playful environment. I’ve always found interviewing people – and discovering more about their industry, interests and ideas – fascinating. For example, designer Heather Moore of Skinny LaMinx.

2.  Shooting photos with smartphones

A perk of my day job is getting to test out new smartphones on the market. Being a photographer, I naturally check out the camera and regularly set myself photo challenges to see what the phones can do.

I was particularly impressed with the LG G3, which focuses and shoots very quickly. I’ve also been shooting with the HTC One M8. I’ve found that it doesn’t handle very bright sunlight well, but in spite of that it’s still an extremely capable smartphone camera.

3. Shooting and editing video 

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last few years, it’s that you’ve got to be very adaptable and open to learning new skills to stay relevant in the online media space.

Having a photography background has made learning about video and video editing easier, but it’s still quite a learning curve.

At work, we recently shot a video using the Sony Xperia M2 Aqua which I edited using Adobe Premiere Pro. It’s certainly not perfect, but I was pretty chuffed with the end result.