Alphabet Dating - Y Date!

The most common thing that comes up when searching for ideas for Y date is YouTube. If you don't already know, we film YouTube videos a lot anyway. So it wasn't really an exciting date idea. However I do love it when we film fun videos so it was a good excuse to do one. We filmed us playing the Who Am I game that we got for Christmas. We also bought yellow sweets to eat whilst we played Lego Batman (we also bought Lego minifigures that day). And to finish it off we had chips, cheese and beans whilst we watched Celebrity Big Brother.

Vlogging Is An Art

I absolutely love watching home videos from my childhood. I have a box full of tapes and rewatch the entire box every few years. It's not that I miss my childhood, it's just that I really like watching something so real and so 'spur of the moment'. Unedited/fly on the wall footage intrigues me. People being caught on film acting completely natural is just a beautiful thing to watch. I remember that the camera always came with us on holidays and was set up in the corner every Christmas. There are videos from me 1 day old in hospital, right up to a holiday in Paris when I was 10. Technology advanced significantly around this time. Smart phones and digital cameras came out and it became a lot easier to be spontaneous with capturing events. You don't need to set up a camera in the corner, you just film the main present on your phone. It does make me sad that I can only watch my family up to a certain point and then the videos and photos are few and far between. There are hardly any videos at all from our 2 week family holiday to Florida which is something I will always regret. I have the memories and photos but I wish I could watch more of what we did and how we were. I was 13/14 and would love to see my personality on film.
When I was 13 I bought a magazine with a free film camera in and took photos of a day out with my best friend. We bought a small photo album for the photos after getting it developed and it was a really fun day that we shared and captured together. I bought my own digital camera when I was 17 and used it quite a lot to take photographs of my time at University and the first few years of my relationship with my girlfriend. I also bought a DSLR whilst at University which I love for arty photographs but it's not really something I would take out with me on a normal day. I got a Canon SX700 for Christmas 2014 and I love it. It allows me to take really good photographs in the moment but also change the settings and use different filters to take arty photos if the opportunity arises. I now save my photos in monthly folders so I can look back on what I did that month, but I find most of the photos are posed selfies or nature and they don't really capture the moment.
Early in my relationship with Kirsty she would make little videos of us on days out. I really like that we have those memories. I filmed on our trip to Disneyland Paris for my 21st birthday but I did it with the intention of putting music over it so didn't talk to the camera. It's nice that I have something to watch but it's not natural. Kirsty and I bought a camcorder a few years ago and started doing YouTube videos. We would do question tags, quizzes, and talk about books we had read. But the main reason we got it was to vlog.
Vlogging has really taken off on YouTube over the past few years and I am so glad. Watching vloggers is almost like watching a reality TV show but far less scripted. It's the natural style of video that I love but you can still use clever, arty editing. At the moment I am loving Lucy and Lydia's vlog styles because although they are really natural on camera, they do put a lot of effort into capturing the moment and editing it all together to look really cool. Family vloggers like SacconeJolys are an inspiration to me because they capture some footage of their children every day, it allows them to see how their children have grown. They have footage from when their children started talking and walking and the first day of nursery. I don't think I would ever 'daily vlog' when we have children but I would definitely try to make sure I capture those milestones. I know some people would prefer to be in the moment, instead of picking up a camera. But I am definitely a person who wants to capture things to look back on.
Kirsty and I have a joint channel for our videos. We used to vlog quite a lot. We would film over Christmas, New Years, Easter, Birthdays, Trips to Wales and Holidays. The main reason we stopped filming so much is because we stopped going to so many places and started saving up for our wedding and fertility treatment. Also, I got quite depressed between 2014 and 2016 and didn't really do much of anything. My favourite videos of ours are from Summer In The City 2015. It's a YouTube convention with panels about editing and camera settings. There are also more specific panels for people who talk about books or share their relationships online, and the whole place is full of people who love filming or watching videos. Can you imagine?! A building full of people walking around filming themselves or each other and all of them love capturing the moment and looking back on it just like I do. It was one of my favourite weekends. I was around people who had a similar passion to me with my fiancee by my side. We met Jonathan and Anna Saccone-Joly. We learnt how to make our videos look better with lighting and background. We definitely prefer watching our newer 'sit-down' videos since improving the quality. And my favourite vlogs on our channel are from that entire trip because I can see how confident I am and how happy we are together. I remember it being the first time I was truly happy that year. Like the environment had fought through the depression and lifted me up.
We do still vlog every now and again with updates on what we have been up to but we don't tend to vlog unless we are doing something out of the ordinary, because those are the things we want to be able to remember. I'm quite a simple editor, just put the clips together and cut out the boring bits. Kirsty is more of an arty editor, she zooms in on funny parts and puts music in that makes it more interesting. Our vlogging is a constant improvement, especially now we have a 4K camcorder which we are going to insure so we can take it out with us. For me, talking to a camera is like writing in a diary. It's a way to talk about my emotions (which I generally find hard to do face to face). YouTube in general requires so many skills that are easy to forget. You need to know how to use a camera and change the settings to make the lighting and colour look better. Maybe you need to set up lights. You need to edit it, adjust the volume, add music or other effects, save it in the right format/quality. Kirsty has been going through all of our old videos and watching them so she can make the titles funny but relevant and add in appropriate tags. It's time consuming and may not seem rewarding when you think that less than 10 people know our channel exists! But every single time we finish filming a sit-down video, spend a day vlogging, or upload an old vlog we forgot about, we have completed something. We have finished a video that we can now look back on and that is reward enough.

#YouTubeSITC 2015

I went to Summer in the City with Kirsty last weekend.
We stayed in a hotel Thursday to Monday and SITC was Friday to Sunday. And it was so good. We took notes in every panel and we learnt so much and have so many new ideas for our joint YouTube account. Including buying a lava lamp for our new setup (and also because who doesn't need a lava lamp in their life).
We took a lot of photos after I was taught how to put my camera on manual setting with the correct ISO, aperture, shutter speed etc. And a lot of videos with better settings too which Kirsty is currently editing into a vlog.

If you have a YouTube channel and want to learn more about it, or if you're thinking about setting one up then I definitely recommend watching the Summer in the City panels which should be going on their YouTube. I think they filmed most, if not all of them. They really helped us out.

These are some of our photos from the day, including when we met the SacconeJolys who I am a huge fan of and were so nice in person.

Leave your youtube links in the comments and I will check them out!

Our day in Gloucester

Last Summer, I went with Kirsty and my mum to visit my brother's family in Exeter. On the way back we stayed in a hotel in Gloucester, which is about halfway between Manchester and Exeter. The next day we explored Gloucester cathedral and some of the shops and we fell in love with the town. Since then we have pretty much decided we would like to live there one day, but would obviously have to explore it more for that to be likely. And, more importantly, we have found our dream wedding venue is nearby!
This Summer we went back to Exeter and of course stayed over in Gloucester again. We didn't go in the cathedral this time or explore shops because we had a Treasure Trail to do! That was a lot of fun and allowed us to explore the town a bit more, but we did miss out a whole page of clues at one point and got extremely confused.
I didn't take many photos because we were mainly walking around a lot, but the photos I did get I love. So here they are!

Do you have a dream city to live in? Or even a favourite place you love to take photographs of?
Let me know in the comments!

WHAT I GOT FOR MY BIRTHDAY!!!

This is going to be a photo-heavy post.

These are most of the gifts I received from my parents, siblings, nephews, nieces and my fiancee.
I won't list who bought what, or where everything is from, but I have also shown everything in a video on my YouTube which will have more detail.

If you want to know more about anything you see here, leave a comment and I will get back to you very soon!

I also got some sweets, a thorntons toffee cake, a lot of scratchcards and a lottery ticket.
I went to see Tomorrowland at the cinema and I really enjoyed it.
I'm so grateful for everything that I received, I can't wait to use it all!

New Beginnings.

I'm rubbish at writing blog posts, I've had about 10 blogs in the past that I've just either forgotten about or given up on. I think part of the problem was that I never had a theme. I never knew what to write about so I had no inspiration. This time I'm determined to stick with it, I'm going to focus on the things I'm passionate about.
I'm not going to stick to one passion, it's going to be a mixed bag of stuff; including make-up, bath bombs, fiction books, photography, animals, and my fiancée.

So, let's write a little introduction.
My name is Raychul. I'm 23 and I live with my fiancée, Kirsty, and my parents. We live in Greater Manchester. I have lived here most of my life. I did move to Huddersfield for 2 years whilst I studied Graphic Design at University but I dropped out due to health problems and moved back home. I met Kirsty online and then in person in 2011; when I was 20 and she was 16. We got engaged in Disneyland in September 2013 and have been wedding planning since. The wedding is not happening anytime soon because we have other plans we want to happen first. Perhaps a certain wedding guest we want to join us. We started videoing our lives 2 years ago. I had wanted to get a video camera for a while, because when I was growing up we would always have one set up on a tripod at Christmas, or my dad was following us round Pontins with one on his shoulder. The first video camera he had was massive, the tapes were video cassettes. The next one was a bit smaller with smaller tapes. The last video camera he upgraded to was a little JVC one with tiny tapes when I was 11. After that there aren't really any videos. Everything went digital and no one bothered with video cameras anymore. Watching all of my old video tapes back made me really miss it, I would watch things I had forgotten about - like exploring Normandy beach when I was 11 - and it brought back happy memories. So I wanted to start capturing things again, and I felt the only way to do it and have it feel authentic was to get a camcorder. Kirsty and I picked one up from Curry's in time for Christmas 2012 and set it up on the windowsill so we could film the whole day. Those videos have completely disappeared, we think they were saved on a computer that crashed and lost everything. We back everything up onto a hard drive now and have started to make videos specifically for YouTube too. We invested in a tripod because we were forever balancing the camcorder on stacks of books, an ironing board lowered halfway, a stack of CDs, a fruit bowl, the back of a sofa etc. We don't spend a lot of money on equipment by any means. Our camcorder is this one and cost about £230. Our tripod is this one and cost £30. I also have my own camera for photography which was bought by my dad as a replacement for my old DSLR.
I will be making a more detailed biography in the future where I talk about my sexuality, mental and physical health, my favourite memories etc.

This blog will be a place for me to write down my thoughts, share my passions and just generally document what I have been up to. I'm aiming to write a new post at least once a week.

I would love to hear about your passions and whether there is anything you want me to write about in the future. I always read your comments (: