How Kersten Luts Built 320+ Podcast Episodes Without a Team

Kersten Luts is a commercial photographer based in London and the host of the Camera Shake Podcast — one of the longest-running photography podcasts in existence. What started as a lockdown sanity project with a friend in April 2020 has grown to over 320 episodes, a weekly release schedule that has never broken, and conversations with some of the biggest names in professional photography, including Barack Obama’s White House photographer.

He does nearly all of it himself. No full-time editor. No content team. No social media manager. And he’s got sharp, unromantic views on why most people who start podcasts quit — and what it actually takes to keep going.

Why He Started — And Why “Passion” Isn’t the Whole Story

The origin story is straightforward: the pandemic wiped out Kersten’s conference photography work overnight. One day his phone rang nonstop — every call a cancellation. By the end of that day, his diary was empty for the rest of the year.

After a Marvel movie marathon (watched twice — once with his wife, once with his kids), he needed something with structure. On a Friday afternoon, he called his friend Nick, who had also been kicking around a podcast idea for months. They set a hard deadline: Monday at 4 p.m., they were hitting record.

“I said to Nick, what are you doing on Monday at 4:00? And he goes, well, nothing because it’s lockdown, I can’t leave my house. And I said, well, Monday 4:00 p.m. is when we’re going to hit record and we’re just going to have to figure it out between now and then. And actually we’re going to call the first episode ‘done is better than perfect.'”

That decision — to name the imperfection upfront and ship anyway — set the tone for everything that followed. They knew episode one would be rough. They also knew episode 10 would be better than episode one, and episode 20 better than episode 10. They treated the early episodes as a learning curve rather than a liability.

The structure the podcast created was itself part of the value. During the first UK lockdown, days blurred together. Recording on Mondays, editing mid-week, releasing on Thursdays — that rhythm gave the week shape. It was, as Kersten puts it, a matter of staying sane, not building a media brand.

The financial reality was never the point. His wife, by his own admission, has never listened to a single episode in six years. And for a long stretch, his audience was essentially nobody. He’s direct about this:

“For the first I don’t know, like 50 episodes or something, it’s probably my mom and my dog who were the only ones listening.”

If you need downloads to stay motivated, this format will break you. Kersten’s framing is different: the podcast is his personal university. The access it gives him to world-class photographers — people he’d never otherwise get to interrogate about their craft — is the return on investment. The audience, the income effects, the industry relationships: those came later, and indirectly.

The 80/20 Production System That Cut His Edit Time from 8 Hours to 90 Minutes

When co-host Nick — a trained audio engineer — left the show once the world reopened, Kersten had a problem. Nick had handled the audio and video editing. Without him, the workflow would collapse unless Kersten rebuilt it from scratch.

He took the only week off in the show’s history to do exactly that. He broke the entire production down into discrete stages — pre-production, recording, post-production, promotion — and applied the 80/20 rule to each one individually.

The question he asked at every step: is there a tool that gets me 80% of the quality with a fraction of the effort? For audio, the answer was yes. Tools like Adobe Podcast handle enhancement well enough that the gap between “trained audio engineer” and “solo host with good software” closes significantly. Not all the way, but enough.

The result: an episode that used to take around eight hours to edit now takes roughly ninety minutes. That’s not a minor efficiency gain — it’s the difference between a sustainable solo operation and burnout.

His approach to social media follows the same logic. He’s not on every platform. He doesn’t have a TikTok presence. He focuses on the platforms where he can actually show up consistently, and he accepts the tradeoff plainly:

“If the day had 48 hours and the week had 14 days, I could probably make a lot more content. But that’s just the reality of things.”

He’s also honest about the economics. The podcast doesn’t generate income directly through the podcast itself — no sponsorship windfall, no massive ad revenue. But it has generated substantial income as a downstream effect: the relationships, the authority, the access. That distinction matters. Most people expect a podcast to pay like a product. Kersten treats it as infrastructure.

Photography Is Not Dead — But Your Business Model Might Be

Some of Kersten’s highest-performing episodes deal with AI, smartphones, and the future of photography. He’s thought carefully about why those topics hit harder than others, and his answer isn’t flattering to the audience: it’s fear.

Photographers are watching their industry get disrupted from multiple directions simultaneously — declining wedding bookings, AI-generated images undercutting stock photography, clients who assume a camera operator can also deliver broadcast-quality video. The questions viewers bring to those episodes aren’t intellectual curiosity. They’re survival anxiety.

Kersten doesn’t dismiss the anxiety, but he pushes back on the catastrophizing. He’s given a talk called “Photography Is Dead” in which he traces the history of that exact claim back to the 1840s. Every major technological shift — portable cameras, medium format film, 35mm, digital, smartphones — triggered the same funeral announcement. Photography absorbed every one of them and kept going.

His data point: in 2025, over five billion pictures were taken globally every single day. Photography isn’t dying. It’s the most alive it has ever been in human history. The question isn’t whether photography survives. The question is whether your specific business model survives — and that’s a question every generation of photographers has had to answer.

He’s seen this shift in his own work. In 2019, video made up roughly 5% of his commercial photography business. By 2026, it’s over 50%. He didn’t pivot because he wanted to. He pivoted because his clients started expecting it. Corporate clients hiring a photographer assume, often incorrectly, that camera competency transfers to video. Whether that assumption is right or wrong, it’s the market reality — and photographers who ignore it are choosing to shrink their potential client base.

His nuance here is worth noting: he doesn’t think adaptation is always mandatory. If you want to shoot weddings on film and make that your entire identity, do it. Own it completely. But then be consistent with that choice. The problem isn’t choosing a lane. The problem is being inconsistent in whichever lane you pick.

What 320 Conversations With World-Class Photographers Actually Teach You

Kersten has interviewed Barack Obama’s White House photographer. He’s talked to music photographers whose work he had on his bedroom wall as a teenager — Van Halen album covers, guitar magazine spreads. He’s spoken to Joel Grimes, one of the most recognized commercial photographers working today.

The Joel Grimes story is instructive. Early in Grimes’ career, he set up shop in a city with established competition and no obvious path to standing out. His solution wasn’t to become technically better than everyone else. It was to out-market them — a Rolodex, a Yellow Pages, a phone, and a hundred calls every single morning. Even after his studio grew, he kept the same camping table with the same phone and Rolodex in his office doorway, so it was the first thing he saw every day. That prop was a commitment device. It kept the habit non-negotiable.

What Kersten has absorbed from hundreds of these conversations distills to one word. Not creativity. Not talent. Not business acumen. Consistency. Every photographer who has built something lasting — across radically different eras, formats, and market conditions — has demonstrated the same underlying trait: they kept showing up when showing up stopped feeling rewarding.

The co-host question is part of this. Would Kersten have made it to 320 episodes without Nick in the beginning? Probably not, he says honestly. Having a second person provides accountability and a shared stake in the outcome. It makes it harder to quietly drop the project when motivation dips. But once the habit is formed — once the podcast becomes part of the routine rather than an effort on top of the routine — the external accountability becomes less critical. The work carries itself.

That shift from “effortful commitment” to “ingrained routine” is the real milestone. Most creators who quit do so before they reach it.

The Honest Answer to “Why Do This at All?”

The question Kersten gets most often is some version of: how do you keep doing this with a full-time photography career, a family, and no team? His answer strips the romanticism out of it entirely. It’s a matter of priorities. Other people go to the pub. Other people play football on Thursday afternoons. He makes podcast episodes. Neither is more virtuous — it’s just what he chooses to spend his discretionary time on.

He’s also clear about what the podcast is not for. If you want to build a YouTube following, there are better ways to spend your time. If you want to generate direct revenue, there are more efficient mechanisms. A podcast — especially a niche, long-form, weekly podcast about a craft — is a terrible vehicle for chasing metrics.

It’s a very good vehicle for going deep, building genuine relationships with people who are excellent at what they do, and compounding your own knowledge over years. Those are real returns. They’re just not the ones people tend to measure in the first few months, which is exactly when most creators quit.

Camera Shake Podcast drops every Thursday at 2 p.m. UK time. It has done so for six years. That’s the strategy.