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10 Years on YouTube!

It’s officially the Photography Banzai YouTube channel’s birthday. 10 years old…

The first time I remember using YouTube was back in Nagasaki Japan in 2006. I had the desire of doing something with it back then, but at the school I was going to the internet speeds were terrible. Not to mention a group of my fellow foreigners were sucking up bandwidth due to their World of Warcraft addiction, lol. I still have my original account and currently post low quality fast food reviews to it.

At the time, YouTube was often used as a video hosting platform of whatever random stuff people wanted to show others. The idea of cohesive genre focused content wasn’t much of a thing. By the time I started the photography focused channel it was starting to happen.

My first video on YouTube for the Photography Banzai channel was a quick clip where I show a film era Kenko teleconverter working with a Pentax K10D DSLR and 300mm f/4 SDM lens. I was active on PentaxForums.com so that was the motivator to share a video clip.

The first video. I replaced the sound through YouTube’s system at one point.

Before all of this, I was into video editing of “anime music videos” (animemusicvideos.org) starting around 2001 or 2002. I already had this website, but I didn’t put a lot of thought into video or making it an officially focused channel at the time.

The idea to go fully in with the channel was more due to seeing growth as I uploaded more clips. It was a natural progression but happened pretty quickly. With the advent of the partner program that further boosted my motivation to create videos.

As things stand now, I’m glad with how far I’ve come, but there looks to be a long road ahead if I am honest about truly making this my thing.

My latest video where I walk around the downtown area of a city and take photos.

I’m finding it extremely difficult to make photography focused videos that actually find any traction on the platform. I really enjoy producing those type of videos, but I do need to be realistic about what works and what doesn’t.

Of course, equipment and gear focused content tends to do better and I need to be more accepting of that. With the pandemic as it is, I stopped going to the camera shop I filmed hands-on videos at. I’ll have to see how things go. One step after the other… after the other…