February & March 2025
February and March was packed with workshops, blog features and taking big steps into digital sovereignty.
While January took years to finish, the last two months really have flown by in a blink of a second. Luckily I started the routine to track my progress in work and life in my new notes app so that my lazy brain can't trick me in thinking I'm doing nothing all day long. So how have they been?
🌈☀️ Good Vibes only ☀️🌈
I honestly wasn't in a good mind place in the beginning of this year. Industry promoting only 💰💰💰 rich kids weddings, low bookings, fucking Nazis taking over the world – the winter depression had me. While all these things didn't fundamentally change through the last months I managed to keep my distance to them and started focusing again on the things I actually could change. And I did a lot.
February
February was a month I layed a foundation for upcoming things. I became a member of the European Elopement Guide in December last year and used February to pimp my profile there and submitted a couple of elopements I shot during the last seasons. By the end of the month my first elopement was approved and published on their website. A queer winter elopement in St. Peter-Ording that I haven't even published myself:
Anouschka Rokebrand
That was really a joyful moment as I have avoided wedding blogs for years, because of their often very strict publishing policies.
Speaking of: if you also want to be part in the European Elopement Collective, I've got a shameless affilate code that gives you a 20% discount on their yearly subscription:
Get 20% OFF with the code STURMSUCHTxEEG
A workshop among wedding photography veterans
Mid-February I was invited to give a workshop among a group of German wedding photography veterans at the North Sea coast near St. Peter-Ording. A wonderful diverse group of photographers with whom I have two important things in common: we are all in our 40s+ and we all are over a decade in the this industry. That definitely led to conversations on a whole new level – insights and stories you only share with those who truly understand our own journey:
Chris | Sturmsucht
Home is where my DNS resolves
I also put a lot of work into my website and set up a brand new start page with a dark gray design. A good start but there is soooo much work to be done on and around my homepage that I feel I haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg yet.
Civil Digital Disobedience
February was also the month I started to rethink my whole digital strategy around the services I use and to whom they belong. I decided it was time to fully embrace and reconnect with the Chris from 10 years ago again. The Chris that compiled Gentoo Linux on his self-assembled hardware and ran self-hosted services for the joy of creating and knowledge. The Chris who self-paid his career training to become a data-protection officer. That privacy-focused, open-source and open-knowledge loving Chris whom I tried to ignore for a decade to fit in and play along.
And I let him take the lead: I ordered new hardware outside of Amazon to upgrade my network and NAS and started to download 22TB of image data from my Amazon cloud and pcloud to have it locally stored with restricted access just by me. And I de-googled my old Pixel phone to GrapheneOS and my Fairphone (affiliated. 50€ off) to CalxyOS by the end of February.
March
March started with a bang. I co-hosted my first workshop in a while with Björn from Hafenliebe at the Northern end of Denmark: The first edition of See.Feel.Create. since 2017. Three days in a cabin at the rough Atlantic coastline. Talking about life, art and business. Being creative together, honest and vulnerable. You can find more insights about that workshop in my separate blog post:
Chris | Sturmsucht
European Elopement Guide
Meanwhile the European Elopement Guide kept pumping out features of my submitted sessions:
An engagement session I did on the Faroe Islands:
An elopement of a Twitch streamer girl and her husband who composes music for horror movies and games:
And they even featured me in a vendor spotlight for elopement weddings:
Cat Ekkelboom-White
Features like these are the things I focus on at the moment to increase my visibility and reach. My main plan is still to leave Instagram fully (I already killed every other account besides my business one) and - by god - I'm challenged every single day to keep that profile up. Getting used to the fediverse and with a healthy distance to big tech social media now, it's irritating and frightening to browse this app with all it's ads, AI generated content slop and cringe self-promotion - not speak about the Nazi in the room.
Now Page
During March I also set up a Now Page, a project created by Derek Sivers to highlight what I am focusing on at this point in my life. It's not a site for business highlights, but for you as a human being. Stuff that goes beyond a normal social media update. Since it is hard to differentiate between the private me and the business me as a single self-employed entrepreneur you will find a mixture of the things I'm working on in and outside of Sturmsucht:
Zum Inhalt springen
The Civil Digital Disobedience continues and grows
In March the hashtag #unplugtrump went viral throughout the fediverse and beyond. Mike Kuketz wrote a wonderful guide (German) on his security blog on how to disobey the fascist tech billionaire movement behind the Trump legislation. And suddenly I wasn't alone anymore with my plan and thoughts.
Last month I started to migrate from Google Docs to CryptPad, signed up for Libro.fm (affiliated) to leave Audible (with the wonderful side effect that I now automatically support a trans book store in Berlin with every purchase) and completed my Amazon/pcloud migration to NAS to re-own my data AND save me money – a BIG task where I could finally de-dust my old terminal skills and play around with rclone sync scripts.
Tools & Services
Also on the tech side of my life I stumbled upon two tools & services I want to recommend you here.
The first is a simply & easy hack to display image resolutions in macOS Finder:
Chris | Sturmsucht
And the second is a quick and easy, but foremost privacy friendly alternative to Google Fonts:
Chris | Sturmsucht
Podcast
Last but not least I was guest at [un]scharf - a German photo podcast by my friend Jens from Lach- und Liebesgeschichten. It was fun talking about stuff that I love and sharing my views on things in our industry. For more details, checkout this blog post:
Chris | Sturmsucht
