Today Fstoppers Turns 1 Year Old
Exactly 12 months ago Patrick and I launched Fstoppers.com. We had never filmed a video before, we didn’t have a single follower, we had never used a blog before, and we had no clue what would happen.
The day we launched Fstoppers nikonrumors.com posted about us (luckily we shoot everything on Nikon) and we got a few thousand hits on the first day.
We began to cold call photographers asking if we could film videos about them. Brownie Harris was one of the first photographers to agree.
A couple months later we flew to CO for a ski trip and posted an ad on craigslist for a “professional snowboard photographer” and Dave Lehl responded.
After that I took a risk and called one of my favorite photographers Peter Hurley. To my surprise he was excited to let us film him.
While shooting Peter I told him about this crazy idea I had that involved shooting a full fashion shoot with the iPhone. When we released the iPhone Fashion Shoot it was picked up by hundreds of websites including NPR.com, Gizmodo.com, Lifehacker.com, and it also made the front of Vimeo and Youtube. Within a few days it had been viewed over 500,000 times.
A month later we got a call from David Bergman; Bon Jovi had agreed to let us film David backstage at their next concert. While shooting David we caught a glimpse of the new (unreleased) Nikon Flex Pocket Wizards in his bag. Over the next few months we did everything we could to ask Pocket Wizard for a set of our own. They finally agreed to send us a few units we created a video with them.
These are just a few of the highlights of 2010. We actually released over 30 videos in 12 months and at midnight tonight we will release what I believe will be our biggest video yet.
Over the past 12 months 2.2 million photographers have visited Fstoppers.com and we are currently averaging 8,000-10,000 unique visitors per day. We have only you to thank. Thank you everyone who has made Fstoppers.com a success. Thank you for creating videos, thank you for submitting videos, thank you for commenting on our posts, thank you for taking part in our forum. Without you, we would have given up a long time ago. Because of your support, Patrick and I have worked harder than we ever have in our lives but we have also had the most amazing year of our lives. We plan to make this next year even better than the first and it will all begin at midnight tonight. The art world is going to be rocked by this next video… you can quote me on that.
Let us know how we are doing in the comments below. If you would like to see more of something we want to hear it.
