Gishwhes (As We Know It) Is Over
August 14, 2017
Game Of Thrones Season 7 Finale… And Brand New Sceneframes!
August 27, 2017
This week something pretty amazing happened: our sceneframes from the filming locations of shows and movies suddenly turned into very viral travel photos. First, they got featured on The Telegraph. A pretty big deal, if you ask us: a major newspaper with a wide readership decided to share the joy of film tourism via our passion project. Naturally, we were pretty delighted and shared the link all over.
We didn’t even mind that they hilighted our very old iPad (even though ASUS is all over the photos and one of our loyalest travel companions) and aged Satu a couple of years older than she actually is, because hey… at least they got our names right this time!
After that, things went crazy. First, a friend living in London tagged us in a photo on Facebook with quite an excited reaction. In her photo we could see a page of a newspaper: a full page story featuring our Game of Thrones sceneframing photos along with our faces on the side.
“Which paper is this?” we asked, expecting some local UK title we might not even recognize.
“Metro. You’re on page three of London Metro!” came the reply.
PAGE THREE OF LONDON METRO.
Soon after, friends from Cardiff started chiming in: “It’s not just London, I’ve spotted you in Cardiff as well. It’s in all the Metros in the UK.”
At this point there was nothing left to do but to scream just a little and laugh out loud a lot. That’s crazy. To think of all the London commuters looking at this, some of them impressed, most probably wondering if we fangirls are all right in the head.
Not long after, we were contacted by Mashable, The Sun, an national radio channel in Ireland and our beloved Lonely Planet, all asking for interviews. Websites for publications like Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, Elle and Cosmopolitan featured our Instagram as a fun one to follow. We got 2,000 new followers overnight and the numbers are still growing.
We’ve spotted our stuff in international publications in Argentina, Thailand, Belgium and in many other beautiful languages we do not speak. We have visitors coming on the website from all over the world like always, but the numbers have multiplied.
Religiously, we kept sharing these posts on our Facebook page, celebrating the lovely attention our years of hard work was getting. At some point it started feeling like bragging, like a little too much of bragging.
So does this blog post, to be honest. But why wouldn’t we be celebrating? This is a pretty big deal for two humble travel bloggers from Finland, who created something out of fangirling and passion for TV shows and movies. It started with a set of 10 photos and has now grown into a blog with over 40,000 monthly readers.
We are so happy. This has been such a boost to not only our blog but also to our sense of worth: just weeks ago I was getting depressed by the sheer amount of work we have to do just to gain a few new loyal followers.
(Reminder: Never underestimate the amount of work that goes into any professional blog.)
And if nothing else, this will serve as a reminder not only to ourselves but to all you bloggers, photographers and other creatives out there:
If you’re passionate about something, stay true to yourself and dedicate your time to something original and delightful, the world will eventually notice.
Well, maybe not all the time… but enough times to make it worthwhile to keep trying.
Links, links, links!
A few links to some of the mentioned articles — many of them are copies of each other, but there are some original ones among them as well:
