A few months ago, I visited a place that had been recommended to me for years. I came away with the conclusion that I should have visited much earlier, much closer to when I was initially told about it.
Well, at the beginning of August the same thing happened. After first hearing about a spot about 7 years ago, I finally made the 3-hour drive to see it. And the entire time I just kept thinking: I should have done this sooner.
Summer in Pogradec has a way of making time feel softer. The lake turns clear and inviting, stretching out under the heavy sun, its surface broken only by swimmers and the slow rhythm of paddleboards. The promenade is alive each evening, humming with the mingled voices of locals and visitors, laughter echoing between cafe tables. In winter, the streets speak almost entirely in Albanian. But in summer, they become a mosaic of languages, each adding its own thread to the season’s tapestry.
This year I’ve tried to lean into it - to say yes to dinners even when I’ve already eaten, to stay out later than I should, to choose connection over a little more sleep. It’s the kind of summer where a paddle on the lake at sunset can flow naturally into pizza at a friend’s pizzeria, where the glow of the evening stretches long after the plates are cleared.
Not everything follows a perfect plan. The morning I was meant to leave for Ireland, I found a flat tire waiting in the driveway. It was a small problem - just a tiny screw lodged in the tread - and the tire shop had me on my way soon enough. A week later I was back, carrying memories of reconnecting with my cousin at his wedding, and falling back into the rhythm of work and life here.
One of my first stops was to photograph a friend’s newly renovated Airbnb - a bright, airy space on the second floor of his house. That evening we sat in the garden with another friend, sharing food, stories, and the kind of easy laughter that carries late into the night. Three people from three different countries - Albania, Northern Ireland, and the United States - finding common ground under the summer sky.
I did a consulting session over coffee. I haven’t done many yet, but each one makes me realize just how much I have to offer - and chips away at the quiet doubts I’ve carried about my own expertise. Later, a walk through town revealed something unusual for this time of year: restaurants dismantling their outdoor seating areas in the height of tourist season. My friend Marjo was doing the same at his cafe, and I helped him take down the patio in exchange for one of the best breakfast burritos I’ve eaten in years.
Not long after, work took me into the mountains to the village of Voskopoje. A team from Nashville had come to help run a junior high camp, and I spent the week documenting their days. One evening we lit a fire on the hillside and roasted s’mores. After the kids went to bed, I stayed behind, looking up at a night sky scattered with stars, thinking about the meteor shower that’s on its way.
The summer heat had left my plants parched. That first morning back was spent watering, cleaning, and catching up on all the unglamorous but necessary work of keeping a home. It’s not the part of summer anyone photographs, but it’s as much a part of life here as the sunsets and long lake evenings.
We’re halfway through the season now - halfway through the hot days and the cotton candy skies. I hope the rest of summer holds more of the same: good work, good company, and moments that linger long after the days grow shorter.
It feels weird to upload these videos weeks after certain things happen, but that's just how it is sometimes, I guess. For example, I went swimming in the lake almost 3 weeks ago, and yet now is the first time I’m putting it onto Youtube.
The beauty of what I try to do on my channel is that in five or ten years time when someone is watching these videos back it won’t matter. The timeline in the videos will be the timeline of the story. The fact that it’s a little delayed won’t matter in the long run.
Frankly, it probably doesn’t matter to anyone that isn’t involved in my day-to-day life either. If you’re watching from the US, you likely have no idea when I did these things. And if it’s put online a bit later than it happened, that’s okay.
At the end of the day, I have to live my life in order to document it.
And here’s a bit of that life:
I’m fairly certain I’m not alone in the fact that I am constantly attempting to balance what I enjoy doing, with what I am more or less forced to do. Just being a human is expensive. Paying for rent, fuel, utilities, food, etc. isn’t cheap, not to mention trying to be responsible by having health insurance, investing money for my future, and looking into purchasing a house. Life isn’t cheap. So naturally I’m forced to be working in a job that pays my bills.
I’m lucky enough to have a job that I thoroughly enjoy. Every job likely has negatives and mine is no exception, but despite the downsides I enjoy being around the people I work with, and using my creativity in order to tell stories that help people. Not everyone can say they get up in the morning happy about the job they will be going to that day, and I do not take that for granted in any way. However…
While I love my work, and love having creative freedom in that work, there’s a part of me that isn’t totally fulfilled by it. This lack of fulfillment seems to be addressed in the other things I do with my time. Some people would call them a hobby, some may consider it a side hustle. I think of it as more of the life I’m striving to build for myself. Making a conscious effort to build a life of freedom for myself. Freedom to create exactly what I am inspired to create rather than being given an assignment. Freedom to not be tied to a single location.
This is where the balancing comes in. Trying to balance making YouTube videos and taking landscape photos with the meetings, events, and assignments for work is no easy task. Consistency on YouTube is not easy in and of itself, but to try to maintain that while also fulfilling all my duties at work makes it even more stressful.
I’m not sure there’s any good way to balance the two without working yourself into burnout. Obviously, there are a few tricks and strategies involved in making it a bit easier. For instance, I often plan out what videos I will make each month at the beginning of the month. That way if I have an especially busy week at work I can prepare for that by record and editing my video for that week ahead of time. But sometimes that’s not even enough, because after long hours at work sometimes the last thing I want to do is put on a presentable face and point a camera at myself.
I really don’t have an answer… I don’t know what to do. An obvious way to get rid of this strife is by quitting my job and focusing solely on YouTube. But I’m nowhere near being able to make that financially feasible, so the job stays. I just have to be conscious of my time and what I spend my hours working on, and likely have to accept the fact that I have to work day and night, weekdays and weekends, for months - and maybe years - to be able to balance these things successfully.
Thumbnail photo: Matt Van Swol (2017)
I went on another photo walk, as I have the habit of doing when visiting a city in Albania. It’s not only a way for me to practice one of my hobbies, but it also provides content for me to create a video for my YouTube channel.
In Gjirokastër, I spent basically the entire walk wandering around the bazaar area. It’s the main attraction of the town and most tourists only see this part of it. So much so, in fact, that sometimes I forget that there’s much more to the city further down the hill. In any case, I elected to go with a particular color this time which was yellow (in case you couldn’t tell from the photos below…).
I really pushed out of my comfort zone on this one. First, asking the owner of the restaurant I ate dinner at if I could take her photo. I just had to because the yellow shirt she was wearing just fit too perfectly into the entire project that I was doing. The fourth photo has a fun story behind it as well, that you can see if you watch the video, but simply put a guy saw me taking photos and when I explained in broken Albanian I was taking photos of things with yellow in them he led me into the upstairs of his shop. His son came running in to translate for us, and it was really just a lovely experience.
As I mentioned, if you want to see the interaction with the shopkeeper and his son, or if you want to watch me wander around struggling to find decent frames that had yellow in them, the video is linked below.
About every 6 months I travel to the southern Albanian town of Gjirokastër. The NGO I work for operates a soup kitchen and after school program for some children there and I go in order to update the photos we have in our archive. For the last three or four times I’ve made the drive, I have tried to connect with a friend of mine. He runs a tourism agency called Experience Gjirokastra that explores the area surrounding Gjirokastër, Përmet, and Tepelenë. Because of weather, other responsibilities, or even just lack of time, we were unable to go out exploring. We had met a couple of times to have a coffee and chat, but never left the main bazaar area of the city. That is, until a few weeks ago…
I’ve started doing photo walks in cities that I go to. It helps me practice my photography - often with some restrictions in place - but it also gives me content to film a video. The best part of doing the photo walks, however, is how it helps me explore and connect to a place.
This time, I was in the seaside town of Sarandë in southern Albania. Because it’s a beach town, I really wanted to capture the vibe that the town gives off. I made a conscious effort to snap photos that give the same relaxed, warm, summery feel that Sarandë has in early June.
As with every photo walk I’ve done until now, I gave myself some parameters. First, was the same as the last photo walk I did in Tirana: I could only press the shutter five times. Five photos, that’s it. No burst mode, no snapping to my hearts content until I got the angle I liked. Secondly, I chose to shoot all of these photos on my phone, which currently is the iPhone 13 Pro. Having three lenses really helps with this restriction, but it still presented it’s own challenges.
In any case, below are the five photos that I took, two of which I’m not very enthusiastic about, and two of which I really like. I’ll let you guess which one is in between those two feelings…
If you want to watch me struggle to figure out what to take photos of… the video is here:
I’ve been trying to use my platform and craft to help promote tourism in Albania, and featuring places to stay around the country seemed like it fit perfectly with that goal. After dozens of messages to hotels and guesthouses around Albania, I finally got a positive response; Hotel Nertili.
Hotel Nertili is a family owned hotel, restaurant, and bar in Sarande, Albania. It was originally built in 2001, but has some ongoing renovations that began in 2020. The management of the hotel kindly offered me a three night stay to experience the hotel and to show it to the world in my own unique way.
