Rationale #1 (Galleries): The Galleries Artifact is exactly what it sounds like. As an aspiring professional photographer, this is possibly the most important page on the entire website. It showcases my work and what I am capable of. It is the selling point for everything I do or will do. Without the gallery page I have no way to showcase my skills as a photographer. Building out my portfolio has required many hours of editing, traveling, hiking, biking, photographing, researching, and possibly a fair amount of beer. Learning editing techniques in Lightroom and photoshop have been essential in achieving the “look” of a photograph. It is a forever evolving skill and quest to learn new and better techniques, improving your composition, staying up to date with editing software, and learning to read weather patterns to predict conditions.

Rationale #2 (Trail Log): The trail log artifact is a compilation of mountain bike trails I have ridden. Granted, it is wildly outdated at this point and is something I am not sure is worth the effort that is required to maintain it. On one hand, it is cool to look back and see all the trails and what I thought about them, and on the other it seems fruitless given Trail forks exists and provides all the same information already. The only real benefit is it is MY take on the trail to provide my followers/ viewers my perspective of a trail in hopes of helping them plan their own epic mountain bike vacation. No special skills required for this aside from physical bike skills I suppose.

Rationale #3 (UGC): This artifact is my platform to pitch brands to work with me. In this case for User Generated Content (UGC). There are a plethora of avenues I plan to go down in my quest to become a successful photographer, and this is just one of them. I believe having a professional looking pitching platform via my website will help in SHOWING brands what I am capable of rather than just simply telling them what I can do. Since I do not have hardly any expiernce working with brands, this is my plan to show professionalism here at the start. I also want to make he process as easy and clean as I can for a brand to work with me. There are a few learning curves here. There is learning how to pitch yourself and make yourself sound intriguing to work with, there is learning what type of content the brands are looking for, shooting and editing the content, understanding contracts and putting them together, and understanding invoicing. I think this will help tremendously on my professional portfolio. There is a fair amount of work left to do before I am ready to actually pitch it to brands, but I think it very much is worth it.

Rationale #4 (Brand Collab):

Rationale #5 (The Migration- Blog): The blog artifact is my destination to create professional content and share it with my followers/ subscribers. It is where I plan to share trip details, editing breakdowns, process outlines, and things of the sort. I plan to get more involved with YouTube and want to maximize engagement by building a short blog post each week associated with whatever the video was I posted that week as well. This way, I have subscribers to my email campaigns to push out information and various updates. The skills required here are numerous. This is everything from knowledge and experience for photography, traveling, mountain biking, training, editing software, and all sorts of technical knowledge that can be shared in an easy to understand yet fun manner. Certainly a skill of its own that has to be learned. I think this will have a lot of value over time and as I begin to create the content on a regular basis and build credibility.

Rationale #6 (Magazine Publishing): This artifact helps provide me with some credibility. Having been interviewed by a magazine and had some of my work published is certainly an accomplishment worth sharing. It is particularly helpful in the efforts of working with brands as it helps develop a more professional base for my brand. Particularly as I am getting started and have few other certifications to show for it.