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I'm Alicia, your effervescent Peter Pan, helping you add a sense of color to your home or shop.
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In the photography world, consistency is preached all the time. You must have a consistent style of photographing and editing in order for potential clients to know who you are. You must have a consistent look to your Instagram feed in order to match your brand. You must, you must, you must.
I don’t much like following the rules. Oh, I obey laws and I don’t cheat at board games, but besides the rules that are in place for our safety and sanity, I find it much more fun to break the rules (if they aren’t going to hurt anybody else).
For years I’ve tried to come up with a style of photographing and editing that I wanted to consistently stick with. In 2011, it was sun-soaked. In 2013, it was high contrast. And into 2015 it was overexposed, pastel, and ‘fine art’. Throughout all of those years though, I found that the most natural way for me to edit was simplistic and natural: a clean edit. But I tried oh so hard to make my work fit the gold standard style of the time, by shooting for sun flares, boosting the contrast, or basically pretending shadows didn’t exist. It wasn’t working for me.
Because you see, I’m not a consistent person by nature. I’ve never fallen into one realm of fitting in. One day I’m in jeans and converse, and the next I might actually wear makeup and put on a dress. One day I’m listening to punk rock music, and the next day I’m dancing around my house to Taylor Swift. Some days I want to relax with tea, and other days it’s GIVE ME ALL THE COFFEE. You get the idea. This raises the question that if I am the kind of person who does what I feel during my day-to-day life, why wouldn’t I do the same for my shoots?
Photography is an art, and even though most of us are working for clients, what we do is still creative in nature. I create by feeling what each specific shoot is saying to me. Not in a woo-woo ‘let me feel your aura‘ kind of way. I simply assess what’s around me, how the situation feels, and go from there.
With time, I’ve learned that I feel much better about a shoot if I allow it to tell me what it wants to be portrayed as (again, figuratively speaking). For me, a cold, dreary wedding day in December featuring shades of dark red and plum should not be shot in the same way that a springtime afternoon wedding would be. If I followed the rules, I would be shooting the winter wedding overexposed, and missing out on the gorgeous dark tones of the decor. Alternatively, I cringe just thinking about shooting a colorful springtime wedding in a dark, moody style.
Sensing the overall mood and feeling of a shoot is the first thing I do in order to determine how I want to proceed. When visiting Iceland and Paris this past September, photographs I took just two days apart were treated in two different ways. Iceland was cold, misty, and foggy, whereas Paris was 75° and sunny. The landscapes in Iceland were made up of lava rock and hardy grasses, versus the sunshine and lush trees we were treated to in Paris. It’s only natural that I would document Paris differently than I had Iceland. Once home from any session, my edits follow the lead I set during the actual shoot. Most of my edits are simple, clean, and bright, but that’s not to say that I won’t take a shot with a moody vibe and pull down my highlights for a more matte look. This works especially well in darker situations with little color.
I believe that my work, in terms of quality and vision, is consistent. I’ve got my own way of seeing a person, a room, an object, a scene, and will shoot with respect to that vision. This vision evolves with time, but doesn’t change from shoot to shoot. What does change is the way I like to work with the light, color, and scenery that is available to me. These factors are unique to each shoot, and I had been doing myself and the client a disservice each time I went into a shoot with the one-size-fits-all mentality of ‘this is my brand, this is my style, stay consistent‘.
I’d love to know your opinion on this matter: is it more important to you to keep your style consistent, or to listen to your creativity? Comment below or talk to me on Instagram, where I inconsistently post everything from latte art, to that cute dog I saw downtown.
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I make whimsical art for color-lovers and California dreamers. I'm based in Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C. where there are most decidedly no palm trees in sight.