One year ago Jay and Varina Patel and Samantha and I started a website called Visual Wilderness where we hosted instructional eBooks for nature photographers. Our eBooks have been well received and we have had many comments about how much people have learned from these products. But… to every thing there is a time and a season. This week we are announcing that Visual Wilderness will close by the end of August. Here is what we wrote over on the Visual Wilderness website:
What a year it has been here at Visual Wilderness!
When we look back, we are humbled by the support of all the photographers who have visited this site and found useful instruction in our eBooks. Visual Wilderness was begun because we saw a need for accessible, high-quality instructional eBooks on how to photograph natural subjects. Based on your comments and support, this belief was affirmed. We truly appreciate your faith in us!
Looking back, we have also learned valuable lessons. The photography market has changed a lot over the last two years with many new excellent photography products and services proliferating across the internet. Being a nature photographer and photo instructor requires the wearing of many hats: entrepreneur, graphic designer, book-keeper and marketer are just some of the skills of a successful modern-day photographer. All of these roles take time. Sometimes in a business you need to take an objective look at future directions. Each one of the contributing photographers on this site has his or her own individual business offering services from stock, assignments, and prints to instructional products like seminars, webinars, workshops, tours, and eBooks. For each of us, making our individual businesses viable is our first priority, and to do so requires much investment into marketing and promotion. In the end there is little energy left for a ‘community’ project like Visual Wilderness.
So it saddens us to announce that we will be closing the Visual Wilderness website and the Visual Wilderness store by the end of August 2011 to concentrate on our individual projects. We’ll post links here over the next few weeks about where you can find each of us and what we are doing in this new world of photography.
Before we close our store for good, we are having a big sale on all of our eBooks. All eBooks on the Visual Wilderness site are discounted by 15% until August 31 at 11:59 PM EST. Just use the code THANKS on checkout to use the discount. Thank you for your support and happy shooting!
Jay, Varina, Samantha & Darwin
Be sure to take advantage of the 15% discount to get great instructional eBooks
Darwin Wiggett 