Milestones

 Beyond The Campfire started back in 2010 as an offshoot of an old 1990's website I developed called Oklahoma Backcountry. OKBC was an experiment where I learned how to construct a story and how to put my outdoor experiences into words. It was mostly about hunting and fishing along with some other outdoor related adventures mostly in the Oklahoma outdoor arena. Being an applications programmer I created the site using HTML code, which took a bit of a learning curve. Over time it developed a small but consistent following and garnered somewhere around 50,000 hits or so within its lifetime. It was selected as one of the top 10 AOL Hometown websites and was one of the featured pages on that platform. But, in time, the AOL Hometown platform closed down suddenly and almost all of the stories and photos posted on the site were lost. Except for a few printed stories, everything else was lost.

Fast forward a few years and I ended up in Kentucky. Photography became a larger part of my life and I began to explore the possibility of starting a new webpage with a focus blended on outdoor activity and photography. I settled on using Blogspot as a platform. It fit my purposes almost perfectly and in October 2010 I started Beyond the Campfire (BTC) and posted my first article, Time on the Prairie,  https://beyondthecampfirebykeith.blogspot.com/2010/10/time-on-prairie.html

It was short paragraph with a single photograph, but it was a beginning, and since then I've posted and shared almost 500 articles using countless photographs, with visits from almost 90 countries, all 50 states, and hundreds of cities. As of this writing BTC is approaching 140,000 hits. In 2018, using a similar format, I created a Media Page for the local Sunny 16 Camera Club. (https://sunnysixteencameraclub.blogspot.com/)  It has grown to date with almost 20,000 hits from 40 countries, 40 States, hundreds of cities, with over 80 articles and hundreds of photographs provided by club members.

Back 2019, After hundreds of articles and photographs, I felt like BTC had grow a bit stale and repetitive having lost some of its originality and freshness, so I decided to shut it down. It remained available for anyone to visit and browse through the archive of articles, and so it remained dormant for a while. 

By 2021, those creative longings once again began to stir and BTC was reopened with a newer approach focusing less on the how-to photography and more on the outdoor experience with photography as a measure of the moment. I also started making more video productions calling them Beyond the Campfire Adventure Photography Video Productions. That endeavor has gone through a great deal of trial and error, a lot of error, but has evolved into a series of YouTube video's focusing on the outdoor experiences captured not only through photographs, with using videography as the main media tool.

Beyond the Campfire over the past 12 years or so has taken on a life and personality of its own. My writing and videography skills are improving, with lots of room yet to expand into. I am thankful for all of the support and following from every visitor and I hope Beyond the Campfire has inspired you to explore the outdoors with your camera.