My name is Ritchie Roesch, and welcome to Fuji X Weekly, my Fujifilm X100F journal! Thanks for stopping by, I hope that you find this site interesting. Feel free to bookmark it so that you can check back often.

I thought for the first post that I would share with you how this blog came to be, and what my intentions are for its future.

This isn’t my first blog. I ran the Roesch Photography Blog for over six years. It was a “general photography” site and covered every topic under the photographic umbrella that I cared to write about. I had some successes with it (one post had over 40,000 views), but a few weeks ago I pulled the plug and deleted the whole thing.

First, it was taking up too much of my time, and I felt like I wasn’t getting what I wanted in return. I was earning some money through Google Adsense (which, by the way, is a complete ripoff), but not much. I’m reminded of the movie Napoleon Dynamite when Napoleon does some day labor at a chicken farm. After working hard all day and getting paid in coins, he adds up what he’s earned and exclaims, “That’s like a dollar an hour!” I was earning that only on a good day.

I kept telling myself that the time and effort I was putting into that blog was self-promotion, and one day it would pay off. It’s true that I did get some paid work from the blog, but most often I was hired by word of mouth, sometimes my own words from my own mouth. Only a couple of times did I get work as a result of the blog itself. It was very inefficient marketing, if marketing was my intent.

Then I discovered that my photographs–and even my words–were being stolen. I searched the web for myself and my pictures, and I found that I was routinely being ripped off. In some cases people were taking complete articles, including the photographs, and posting them on their own websites as if they wrote the content and took the pictures themselves. I was now spending time asking the thieves to remove the stolen content.

And those people are indeed thieves! They are lowlifes who can’t do it themselves, and instead of paying for content, they steal it. They’re cheaters. They profit off of other people’s hard work. They’re leeches, and probably worse.

I found that someone had cited me in their college paper. This was a poorly written essay that I imagine couldn’t have received a higher grade than a D. I wasn’t directly quoted, but a whole paragraph paraphrased my words. And it made me look as though I wanted young girls to have poor self-esteem. The words, or the paraphrasing I should say, was taken well out of context. The point of my article was that people were overreacting to Steve McCurry’s use of Photoshop. Somehow that turned into me saying that young girls should have a negative opinion about themselves.

All of this was much too much! I was wasting my time. I was being ripped off. I was being grossly misquoted. I wasn’t accomplishing what I was intending to accomplish. So I took it all down.

I took a few weeks off from blogging. I reassessed where I’m at and where I want to be. I looked inward. I took some time to reconsider everything.

I love to photograph and I love to write. Those are two things that I truly enjoy. So I decided to do just that, except without profit or self-promotion as a driving force. I’m not placing advertisements on this website. I’m not posting links on social media or other people’s sites trying to drive traffic here. If nobody ever reads this, I’m OK with that. I’m not looking for money or attention. I’m publishing this because that’s what I want to do.

I’ve called this blog Fuji X Weekly because I plan to publish one article per week. Sometimes I might write more than that, sometimes less. I’m limiting the amount of my personal time spent doing this to something that’s not burdensome. The topic of choice is Fujifilm X cameras, specifically my Fujifilm X100F that I purchased four weeks ago.

I subtitled this bog My Fujifilm X100F Journal. That’s what this is. I’ll be talking about one camera. I’ll be writing about my personal experiences with this one camera. And that’s it! However, I purposely left the name of this site, Fuji X Weekly, a little more ambiguous in case that I decide in the future to expand to include other cameras. I didn’t want to make something that might become too limiting or obsolete in a few years.

I kind of hope that this blog remains mostly hidden with a small (but hopefully engaged) audience. I want this to be a treasure for those who find it and are truly interested in its content. But I don’t want it to be a treasure trove for those who are looking to easily steal and profit from my hard work.

That’s what this whole Fuji X Weekly thing is about. I’m glad you’ve found it and took some time to read it. I hope you’ll enjoy my posts and come back frequently.

Thanks for coming!

Ritchie Roesch