Lizel Strömberg

 

These past 5 months or so, my updates here on my blog have been the worst. Time has flew by and things have been super crazy with lots of work, drama and life. To tell you about everything that have happened will take me days to go through, but I will try to fill you in over time. As a start, I will give you a brief update of what I've been up to these past few months and some of my plans for my content in the near future. 

First off, the end of 2017 I went back to my roots in The Philippines to visit my relatives there. I travelled from Sweden with my aunt and cousin. My trip was nothing that I expected it to be. I wanted my trip to be a time for me to bond with my relatives, experience new places and take a time off from work to have fun. It was all that I wanted, but add a lot of unnecessary drama that really took a hit on my mental health. I won't be going into specific things but in simply terms, people don't always get along with each other. On top of that, I also managed to caught something which made me sick during the visit. 

Despite all the negative factors of my visit in The Philippines, I had the trip of my life! I've never bonded with my relatives before as much as I did, I experienced a lot of new fun stuff and met some new people. I have lots of photos from all of the fun shenanigans I did with my relatives. I even tried out to vlog during my vacation and I have to say, it was very hard. I can't wait to share all of my content from The Philippines! I will share all of it over time in between all of my concert and event photography. I hope you will enjoy what I've captured of the country and culture of my second home. 

As for those who follow me on my social medias such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, are fully aware that I've been doing press coverage of Melodifestivalen 2018 together with Jenevia. Most of you that are following me, do that because of the music content I create. Heading into Melfest this year, was very difficult for me because I had only arrived back in Sweden from my trip to The Philippines, three days before I took the train to Karlstad (semi 1). Everytime I leave The Philippines I'm very sad to get back home in Sweden. Adjusting from the differences between The Philippines and Sweden is one of the hardest things I know. Not to exaggerate, it takes me months to adjust back into my life in Sweden. Consider everything that happened during this trip, everything was even harder than usual and I was not prepared to do press coverage at all but I had to suck it in and keep working. I had to keep it together not only for myself but also for Jenevia's sake.

★ Research

★ Booking accommodations

★ Plan which transportations we take to different places

★ Making sure we don't forget to eat inbetween our work

★ Making sure we get a proper place to conduct our 1-on-1's

★ Filming our interviews 

★ Photographing all the events on set during the Mello weeks. Everything from our 1-on-1's, press conferences, rehearsals, parties and more.

★ Editing all the photographs during the tour

★ Planning my content and posting on my social medias

★ Translation, which mean subtitles on our interviews or translate information that is in Swedish to Jenevia but also helping out with the communicaton between Jenevia and the creative people we meet

★ On top of everything, I also try to film some behind the scenes footage for video content

That's just some of the things I do when I'm on set, Jenevia does a lot of work hereslf which are more focused on the work before, during and after the interviews we get. It's a lot of work for just two people and it would have been nice to have an extra person with us to help us with everything, specially with all of the things I do. As for now, we can't do much about it other than keep working on our content and grow our numbers. 

For some reason, there were a lot of drama on set this year. I'm not sure if it's because we are a lot more in the bubble than previous years and more people are starting to be aware of us and the work we do. I'm not here for the drama and it hit med a lot more than it should have. I don't want to get into specific things but I will mention some of it in future posts to give you a more insight of what I mean. Everything with this year's season was simply not what we expected it to be.

I would lie, if I told you I was doing fine since I'm not. As for now, I'm trying to recover from being sick and all of the craziness that have happened over the past few months. I wish I could work on my photography more than I am, but I need to prioritize my ordinary job and my health. I need to be careful and think about my health, I'm already starting to see signs that I'm pushing myself too much without an actual time to rest. I can assure you, I'm still working but you might not alway see it because there's so much more else happening behind the work you get to see me posting. I will take everything in my speed for now and only focus on editing my photography and videography. All the other kinds of content involving music mondays, sharing other kinds of work will come once I'm more in phase with my work. 

Summer season is closing in, the outdoors concerts and events are soon about to start. I will of course cover and photograph the nearby events, since that's what I love to do. I'm not 100% sure yet of what kind of opportunities I will be giving but I'm going to do my best to do as much as I can. I have lots of idéas for content that I want to create, not only regarding event and concert photography but other kinds of photography as well. I want to explore and practice other kinds of photography to envolve my work. I will also try to create video content to practice a new type of way to express myself. 

This will be the end of this post and if you read through the whole post, kudos to you! More content is on it's way! Stay tuned for more updates and until next time, ingat!

/Lizel