Micael Widell Newsletter #8: Star Wars Insects, Soviet Ghost Town Pyramiden, Mathieu Stern + Micael Widell collaboration, The Future of my YouTube channel, and more!
Captain's log
Hi friends, all 1004 of you! In personal news, November has been the shittiest month in a long time for me, as I have been constantly sick in colds and flus the entire month. However, I have somehow still managed to collect 540 words of photography inspiration in this newsletter. Enjoy!
Star Wars Insects
Richard Wilkinson is a freelancee illustrator living in Brighton. He made some very cool illustrations by combining the concepts "star wars" and "insect". Check them out.
Beautiful Soviet Ghost Town Pyramiden
Pyramiden is an abandoned Russian coal mining settlement on the Norwegian archipelago. It was founded by Sweden and later sold to the Soviet Union. If you love stunning landscapes combined with abandoned soviet ghost towns, you must check out this gallery.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/57045657/PYRAMIDEN-A-Soviet-Ghost-Town-on-Svalbard-(78-North)Mathieu Stern Collaboration
One of my favorite YouTubers is Mathieu Stern, who runs a channel mostly about weird and interesting lenses. For example, check this crazy video where he travels to Iceland to make a lens out of an iceberg!
I respect Mathieu a great deal, because he is one of very few YouTubers who is talented both artistically (ie. he can actually take aesthetically pleasing photographs) and technically.
Mathieu reached out to me and asked if I wanted to make a video for his channel. I immediately said yes, and the result is a deep dive into Swedish candy and inventions, using a vintage lens and focus stacking.
Little Spaces
I started browsing the galleries in the photography section of behance, and found a lot of goodies. This is a beautiful gallery of little spaces in perfect damped evening light.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/87193381/LITTLE-SPACESThe focus of my YouTube channel
Something that has become clearer and clearer during 2019, is that you guys are interested in macro photography videos from me, a lot more than anything else. When I have made videos about analog photography or reviewed lenses that aren't macro lenses, these videos have never gotten many views. A typical macro photography video gets around 10 times more views and comments than a video about any other subject.
I still do like lots of different kinds of photography, but it really sucks when I have put a lot of work into a video and it only gets 2000 views, when I know that I could have made a macro video instead and gotten 8 000 - 100 000 views. So I have decided to focus my channel a lot more on macro photography for a few months, and make that a clearer niche of mine, to see what happens.
What do you think about that?
My Published Videos since the last newsletter
- How to Shoot Ultra-Sharp Macro Photography for Cheap : Reverse Vintage Lens
- 33 of Your Macro Photography Questions Answered!
- Ricoh GR III Review and Macro Photography
- Viltrox 85mm f/1.8 Review – Best Budget Portrait Lens for Sony and Fujifilm?
Goodbye for now
Thank you for reading this far, and see you in a month! Feel free to follow me on YouTube, Instagram and 500px in the meantime. And also feel free to tell your friends about this newsletter, and to reply to it if you have feedback or comments :)
/Micael