After the fact - it is now Saturday, June 15, and it has taken me a long time to get around to finishing this image - nothing to do with the picture, I have just been super busy. Well I told myself I was not going to bed until thus thing was posted so I ran the stack and just got it tucked away. This is just my personal, deeply biased opinion, but this is the best photograph that I have taken in the whole time I have been working with the Optolux System - this is the shot we took together during the Thursday livestream, and I could not be happier. I hope that the folks at Optolux see this one, because this is exactly what I have been trying to show throughout this evaluation - with careful technique this system is as versatile and powerful as flash, and in some creative ways, surpasses it. So here is my final image with the amazing Optolux Solis Trio!

It is Monday, June 10, 2024 and the start of another fascinating week of surprises and adventures. I spent the last weekend thinking about what I could do, to keep the channel interesting and challenging for you, my existing audience, while also attracting new viewers. When I start thinking about making improvements, the first place I go is to my Patreon Supporters, which I did this past weekend. This is a small group, about 1% of my YouTube Subscribers, but I know them well and trust them completely to have the best interests of the channel at heart. What makes them Patreon Supporters is the fact that they each make a donation each month, and in so doing, support my work by allowing me to pay my bills while making content creation my full time job. Most of the monthly donations are modest but I also have a few very generous benefactors who make a huge difference in the bottom line. But the fact remains that even with this incredible support, my business has survived by the skin of its teeth over the last five and half years. I continue to draw on my retirement savings most months and have never once been able to take a salary from the revenue that flows (trickles?) into the business. And that is OK because I started this business so that I could teach people who I had never met how to take awesome macro photographs. I did not start it to build an empire or make a fortune, but I did hope that I could, one day, have it become self-sustaining so that I could do the work I love without having to  ask for help.

Depending on how you look at it, I am almost there. By that I mean that I can almost pay all the expenses that are part of keeping the business going - almost. But the reality remains that I am only ever one nostril above the waterline and hoping that it doesn’t rain. And on those occasions when it has rained, someone has always stepped forward to  help me through the crisis. And that leads me to the point of this week’s post - I want to share with you my new goal for the channel.

By the end of this month, June 2024, I would like to have added enough new Patreon Supporters to give me a two month cash reserve, ensuring the channel can weather any coming storms, and continue to produce regular original content without interruption.

I have made it a point to actively solicit support as infrequently as possible - nobody wants to be bugged by constant pressure to help - but it would be doing all of us a disservice if I never mentioned it at all. The last time I asked for your help was more than 9 months ago when I was trying to secure enough support to hire an employee to help me offload some of the mountain of non-creative work that needs to be done every week. There was a response, mainly from existing members increasing their monthly support amount, but it fell far short of my target and I am still no closer to having a helper. That is OK, as I was never sure that was even a realistic goal to set. I have since adapted to the reality that I would be continuing on as a one-man-band for the foreseeable future.  So when I ask if you would consider supporting my work today, it is with a much more modest goal of just adding a little prudent padding to my scrawny budget. I hope you will consider doing so!

Circling back to the start of this post, it is this group of Patreon Supporters that I turn to for guidance on the best direction for me to take. And in exchange for their financial and moral support of the work I am doing, the members receive a number of benefits. These benefits include a minimum of 4 hours of face-to-face time with me every month. These are private meetings for my Patreon Supporters and they can be used however the group dictates. I come to each 2-hour session with a prepared block of content, but there is always priority given to the requests of the  group members. My supporters are also entitled to receive private lessons at deeply discounted prices. My most generous donors have direct access to me and can design a premium package that makes the most sense for them. Whenever I put on a program for my wider YouTube audience, I always make sure to  include some type of benefit for the Patreon supporters, be it premium content, exclusive access to guests, early release content and so on. I try very hard to make your Patreon experience as positive and useful as possible. Even the Discord server has a private chat room for my Patreon supporters.

To lear more about Patreon membership please visit https://www..patreon.com/allanwallsphotography   which is also where you would go to sign up.

If you are not interested in the Patreon option but would like to support me in a very different way, you can do this by using any of the links that I provide in my videos, live streams or blog posts. If you buy something after using one of my links to get over to B&H or Amazon, I may make a little commission on your purchase. I only link products I use, own, or lust after, so you can trust them. And it is the vendor who pays the commission - not you.

How about a little practice? You need a new SD card, don’t you? Well there is one that I particularly like and I am pretty sure you will be happy with it. So why not try the link below and, if it works out as well as I am sure it will, use any of my links, anytime you need to visit one of these vendors. You will get the best gear, the vendor will get the best customers, and I will keep the doors open a while longer. That, my friends, is a win-win-win scenario! Please note that this is not the actual size of the card - would be nice though. How mush would a 128TB disk cost anyway?

Moving on, I have decided to add a guest judge to my monthly macro photography competition, in order to further lower the impact of my personal opinion in the judging process. And who do you suppose got the first chance to sign up as a guest judge? You guessed right, my Patreon Supporters. In fact, I now have enough volunteer judges to have a different expert photographer to help me judge all the remaining competitions in  2024. I really think that this is going to elevate the competition and attract new contestants every month. One added benefit of this is that I will be publishing the themes for coming competitions for the entire year, so that volunteer judges can select the topics that feel most qualified to judge. Thank you Patreon!

So what about the coming week, you ask? As always, I will be presenting two Livestreams this week, starting with Macro Talk on Tuesday at 8PM. I have decided to unpack the Optolux Solis equipment (as I await shipping instructions from the factory) and use it to give an impromptu workshop on continuous lighting in studio macro. Here is a link to the show - https://youtube.com/live/EuxyHOBtKIs?feature=share

This will be an opportunity for me to show you the much loved Solis Trio doing its thing as the ultimate continuous light source for studio macro photography. It always makes me nervous to move the studio down to the other end of the building, so I have already started rearranging things to be fully prepared for whatever happens. We will photograph a couple of fresh specimens that I collected yesterday and I will do the entire thing during the stream. If you are a flash photographer considering branching out into the world of continuous lighting, this will be one you don’t want to miss. The focus will be on the practical issues of a continuous light shoot and I will not spend too much time on the bigger issues of when continuous light is the right choice and what alternatives you have.

Because on Thursday, that is all I will be talking about - the role of continuous lighting in macro photography. I bet you want a link to this oe too… https://youtube.com/live/gNvKLOfQ7rU?feature=share

At 2PM on Thursday I will be back up front in the studio to make the case for continuous lighting as a strong alternative to flash in many cases. This will be fun -  as I am one of those macro photographers who turned his back on continuous light a long time ago, but who has been forced to reconsider that position in light of recent advances in lighting technology.

Couple  of reminders - Next weekend is Tangent (Saturday June 22) and the theme is “Your Rig” - it can be what you have or what you want, and of you have any. questions, pop over to discord, visit the Tangent room and ask the man yourself.

And in closing , June 29th at 10AM is the launch of the new AfterStack macro editing live workshop from Allan Walls Photography and Bud Perrott. It is going to be free, it is going to be fun, and it is going to be FABULOUS - I will post the meeting invitation on the AfterStack page of the AWP Discord server in a few days - but mark your calendar today.

That’s it for now… See you tomorrow!