DATE: Mt. Kilimanjaro, on film opens this Friday with over 75+ photos that showcase the expansive beauty, extreme conditions and incredible community of Africa's tallest peak. It’s been a year-long goal to host this event, so I’m incredibly excited for this night to finally be here.

​About: A mostly-weekly publication about living a great story: mostly personal stories, adventure recaps, links to coolness and analog photos, maybe or maybe not relevant to the story.

Quote for the Week: “Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.” — Georgia O’Keeffe

Read time: 3 min

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The Idea

The vision started early early this year. As my LIVE A GREAT STORY full-speed commitment wound down and my art energy cranked up, the idea to host a Kili photo exhibit came into focus. More than anything, I wanted to share the photos because mostly, no one has seen these. I’ve barely shared any on social media, unwilling to limit the grandeur of the mountain to a little tiny screen where someone would swipe by carelessly. So I never posted. They live in a photo album, a real photo album with a hard cover and physical pages reminiscent of what you’re parents have stored in their attic, but not on the internet. Unless we’ve sat together flipping through the album, these photos are basically unseen. Which hurts because they’re so sick and I want you to see them. Out of that gap came the idea for a photography show. That was even before my third trip, where I basically doubled the volume of photos. Coming back in August, I knew I had to host a show, to print everything, to showcase the mountain, the people, the complete adventure. My timing aligned with the 23rd annual Austin Studio Tour and I applied literally the last day possible. I booked a room at Skyline Galleries, where 12 artists will be showcasing their work. For the last two months, I’ve been preparing for this show and I’m stoked that it’s finally happening this weekend! Now as an official Mt. Kilimanjaro trip advisor, my goal is to help people make this bucket list trip happen for themselves. This gallery show is a step towards increasing awareness for LIVE A GREAT STORY’s Mt. Kilimanjaro offering to support our team in Tanzania. My secondary goal is to inspire people to aspire to adventure to their own summits. Life is an adventure, get out there, do big things, keep climbing.

The Lessons Learned

• Canva limits the canvas size to about 82 inches, so I couldn’t map out the 12ft walls true to size. I think this will cause problems for one of my walls where I’m pretty sure I messed up the measurements. We’ll see tomorrow.

• Photo sizes are funky = 4×6 or 5×7 or 8×10 or 11×14 or 16×20

• Instagram taught me to put the photos in front of the glass which is helpful to decrease glare from harsh light. “Museum Glass” which doesn’t have glare was too expensive for this show.

• So. Many. Frames… so I hired a Task Rabbit to help put them all up. I’m not the most handy so last minute (yesterday) I decided to hire someone to help.

• I should have printed everything directly via USB in the store vs sending it all online. I think maybe the photos got compressed and decreased quality but not for sure about this.

• Promotion is hard af… I had grand visions of making lots more Instagram reels but I’ve only made one. This is frustrating because I know how to do it but I didn’t, a gap in goals and execution that wasn’t bridged to my expectation. Really, it’s a time allocation problem, and when it came down to it, I didn’t want to stare at my screen more than I already do.

• So many lessons and insights happen as the process speeds up in the last 10 days before the event. Unfortunately, that’s too late to execute on them. I don’t know if (for me) there’s a way to avoid this, besides tricking myself by “setting the date” for 10 days earlier and really treating it like the final date.

• There’s a gap between the vision and execution and I have to live with knowing it could have been better but I did my best and I feel good about what I’ve been able to do.

• All of the film is 35mm… I want to go bigger.

• Living in all of the photos has been incredible. So often I catch myself flipping through the 600+ photos like “wow”. I was there. Seeing that view. With those people. On that mountain. Three times. Crazy.

• Will I go back? idk… want to go?

A preview of coming newsletters:

• [NEXT WEEK] Grown ass adults sneaking into a music festival, smh… (with a full roll of BW film to show for it)

See you at the show 📷

-z