I’ve been thinking.
I don’t know if you know, but I’m Swedish. I moved to Australia five years ago, mainly because I had to get away from a lot of things, a career that was going nowhere, a personal life in ruins and a winter that was eating away at my soul.
So I ran.
I sold everything and moved to Australia. I’d been a copywriter for five years and I figured I’d try my luck in a new country, in a new language. I lived a whirlwind life in both Sydney and Melbourne and I met Jacqui, my partner and everything, the mother of my two boys. But before that happened I started a personal blog. My father was a writer, but for some reason, or maybe because of that, I had never written anything personal in my life. I had been writing copy and tv commercials for years, but not a single word from within. I started my Swedish blog in 2005, I wrote about the weirdness of my life, about living in a new country and a lot of other stuff. For some reason people liked what I had to say. Soon I had an audience. People kept coming back, asking me for more. It was a very strange experience. There I was on the other side of the world writing a blog about nothing and people loved it. In 2006 my blog was voted the most popular blog in Sweden at a gala in Stockholm. I couldn’t attend.
Fast forward a couple of years.
Jacqui and I was sick of the life we were living. Sick of working in advertising, sick of a lot of things. We decided to move to Brisbane, the city where Jacqui grew up. I got a good offer to work for an advertising agency up here and I decided to have a last crack. We had just started our photography business and weren’t expecting to be able to live from it for a while.
Boy was I wrong.
Like any good photographer I had a website with my portfolio and an about me section and other stuff. I looked at that section and couldn’t get my head around it. You can’t tell people who you are in a paragraph on a page. Or I can’t. After a while I decided to start this blog. It was still a business blog, a shop front for our photography business. I posted the weddings I shot, added some shots of my family now and then and that was that. On the side I still wrote my personal blog in Swedish.
I’ve been debating what to do. I found that I wrote less and less on both blogs. After a while I realized why. This is my life now. I am a photographer. I shoot weddings. Jacqui and I work together and most of what we do have something to do with this business. Keeping the two blogs separate doesn’t make any sense any more.
2010 is going to be a very busy year. I’ll be working all year shooting weddings all around Australia and the world. I don’t know if this is commercial suicide, I have heard other photographers say you shouldn’t mix personal stuff with job stuff, brides don’t like this, brides don’t like that.
I’ve decided to ignore all the advise. From now on this is going to be my personal blog. I will still post my weddings, but also share all the other aspects of my life. I’m sure some people won’t like reading about why my tomato soup recipe rules the world, but this is who I am.
I tell stories.
Mine and others.
I am a wedding photographer, but from now on you will get the backstage pass – access all areas.
by Jonas
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