I’ve been doing these photo challenges for six months, now, and despite the fact that I’ve been part of the photography wordpress community, I wasn’t prepared for how bitchy and cliquey people can be. So far, I’ve had to delete more than a handful of really nasty, shitty comments from people who think they’re photographers, people sending me emails telling me who do I think I am running a photo challenge, and people telling other people to avoid participating in my challenge. In six months of running the Thursday Photo Challenge I have had ONE person share their (awesome) photos with me, and that was via Twitter.

Until I started this challenge, I always thought the WordPress Photography Community was a welcoming place where anyone could participate. Obviously, I was wrong about that. Apparently you have to be approved by the right people to be allowed to do photography on WordPress these days. It wasn’t like that when I started this blog in 2014, and I never got that vibe in all the years I participated in other photo challenges on WordPress, but times they have a-changed and some shitty, bitchy people have installed themselves as gatekeepers.

With that in mind, and given that my blog started 6 years ago so I could share my travel photos with my friends and also keep a log of how I did certain things like put up curtains in my car campervan, I’m going to continue posting my photos in relevant travel articles. Since I’m also a professional author and I largely don’t care to be part of the photography community if they’re going to be fifty-something men acting like the thirteen-year-olds in Mean Girls, I’m going to change my weekly Thursday posts to writing prompts.

Let me be clear. Nothing is STOPPING me from continuing to blog, but I can blog about anything I damn please and I am not interested in the pathetic drama that the photography community is sending my way so they can all get stuffed. Perhaps bitchy comments is why the original weekly photo challenge died a death. I’m sure a fiftysomething man called Roy will be along any minute now to enlighten us all about the things us mere female mortals could never possibly understand.