August 2025

And then it was suddenly August!

And I thought May was busy. Nope! The last few months had me hopping from event to event. From chill weekends away with friends to doing LARP tech for events to organizing my very first own festival! Oh and Castlefest happened! More on that in a bit. And I shot amazing photos at Den Vaderland Getrouwe, which re-ignited my passion for LARP photography!

That's a lot. All cool stuff. And it made me forget the online world. Specifically: posting.

For the last 8 years I mostly posted on Instagram. And.. I noticed I sort of stopped doing that.

So here's a small deepdive into the why of it all. Mostly for me to self-analyse and understand. It's rant-like though, so feel free to skip to the section below.

Why did I stop posting, and why does that hurt

Three reasons for me.

One. Instagram is dead. Dead for photography I mean. There is plenty of mass produced content optimized to ensure maximum dopamine levels and thereby user retention, causing me and many others just to sort of unblinkingly stare at screens swiping from AI generated slop to slop, not caring about the originality of anything anymore. Sure, there are beautiful gems of photos in there, somewhere - and I thank each and every one of you that still persists in posting. But.. photos do not move. Moving pictures means dopamine. Brains seem wired to ignore anything that does not induce happy. And.. the good stuff just gets lost into a sludge of bad. This. Is. Sad.

Two. The Instagram Collab feature. In principle this is lovely! You both benefit of posting a post - it reaches the audiences of both models and photographers. And I do love that so many people have reached out to collab with me! However.. there's a catch for me. It made me, as someone who is already hesitant about what words to use with posts and worried about forgetting a tag or saying the wrong thing, not write anymore. And soon the only posts on my feed were collabs. Each beautiful, but none using my words. The me-ness of what I had online diminshed, and my profile turned into something I cared less about.

Three. Nichification. Or the fact that any instagram profile is not suitable to contain a broad range of topics. You get looked at for a second, then classified. Consequence? I have people saying "no" to working with me because a quick look on instagram shows them a profile that isn't showing what I love to create now, or with them. And that in turns means that what I do end up creating has a tendency to be even more of the same. Solve? Create more profiles? Not for me. I would run into even more pressure to produce and post.

And this left me without enthusiasm for reaching out. To models. To post. And in turn.. left me without enthusiasm to create.

So, a reset is needed. This is not the newsletter to explain how I did that. Because I haven't yet.

Recognize any of this? What was your solve?

And then Castlefest happened!

Castlefest, a multi-day festival held yearly around August in Lisse, sort of became a home away from home. I'm part of the social media team there. A small crew of likeminded creative enthusiasts that love working under pressure - running from stage to stage, grabbing photos and video, moving back to HQ and editing right there and then. Fun! And then seeing all of that slowly end up on the official channels is quite rewarding!

Castlefest is also seeing old and new friends everywhere, falling in love with music I only hear now for the first time, grabbing that moment to teach eachother a few new things and randomly grabbing a good cup of coffee, or mead, with people I just met.

Perfect!

After the event I usually try and collect the photos most precious to me and put those here. I'll show a few below, and if you want to see more, do visit my Castlefest 2025 gallery!