Have you heard of a Blog Carnival? I used to participate in one several years ago when I first began blogging. I’d forgotten about that till recently when researching plugins and then saw one that related to receiving submissions for a blog carnival. Unfortunately that plugin is being discontinued but it gave me an idea.

I would very much like to connect with other nature photographers from around the world who blog regularly (be it daily, weekly, or even monthly) who would like to participate in a blog carnival on a regular basis.

What does this mean?

A Blog Carnival is when a group of bloggers choose to write or post on a particular topic and then links to all of their posts are posted on the ‘host’s’ blog. The next time the carnival happens someone else in the group hosts the posts for that week or month, or however regular the carnival takes place.  I’m proposing to do this on a monthly basis at the moment. unless it proves really popular, in which case the regularity will be more often. The criteria is:

Topic must relate to something that is considered to be of nature, that is the elements of the natural world such as mountains, trees, animals, or rivers. As participants will be photographers the images used in their posts must have been taken by that photographer. Each Blog Carnival host may choose the theme for their turn that is a subset of nature, i.e. Autumn (Fall), Summer, Harvest, Nesting (birds), etc, etc.

Why would I do this? Because, for sometime, I’ve been looking for a way to connect with other nature photographers online, on a regular basis, and I see this would be an excellent way to do it. That way we are all sharing the load, and we get to increase our exposure and backlinks across each blog. More readers/viewers, more links, more traffic and fun.

I’ve done some research and the only photography blog carnivals I could see that were registered at the original Blog Carnival site date back to 2007 and 2008. More recent carnivals seem to concentrate on babies and portraiture. So perhaps this is new for our genre.

The first Nature Photography posts for the Blog Carnival need to be submitted by Friday 3rd February. They will be published on this blog on Monday 6th February.  If  you are interested in hosting a future carnival please say ‘yes’ on the form.  The topic is open for this first one, as long as it relates to nature.

If you are a nature photographer (you don’t have to be professional, just passionate), have a photoblog and would like to be involved, then please fill out the form here. Or, you can register at BlogCarnival.com. I look forward to you joining me in this new project!