Hashtag Authentic Page 3

  A good place to start getting to grips with this again is to review your photography and life as a whole. What common themes occur across multiple areas? What are you passionate about, both online and off? What makes you feel fired up, and what makes you feel at peace?

  Next, it’s time to look at what imagery already speaks to you. On the following pages is a simplified version of an exercise I do with all my students and clients that I find to be useful at any stage of the creative journey. In a world with so many inspirations, influences and opinions, taking the time to refocus and redefine our boundaries can keep us on track and stop us from losing our sense of self and why we started in all the noise.

  EXERCISE

  Naming your visual style

  1. Hunt out the images you love most

  Some might be your own, but others might be on other Instagram accounts, on blogs, in magazines, fashion look-books, movie stills or advertisements. Save them using the Instagram ‘bookmark’ feature, by taking screenshots or snapping quick pictures with your phone.

  2. Gather them all together

  I love the board-making sharing site Pinterest for this, but you can always go for good old-fashioned paper-and-glue – and choose around 8–10 that you really adore. You’re looking for the images that you’d love to have taken (or are happiest that you did). The ones that feel like everything you love in a single frame; that you could look at all day and never get bored.

  3. Now – what do these photographs all share in common?

  Grab a piece of paper and write down anything you notice – the mood, the atmosphere, the light, the colours, the subjects, the scale.

  • Are they shot up close to the subject, or from further away?

  • Are they bright and sunny or darker and more shadowy?

  • Are the tones warm (nudging towards yellow, red, amber and orange) or cool (blue, grey and white)?

  • Are the images uplifting and fun or more complex or melancholy?

  4. Take a look at all the words and phrases you’ve listed: these are your visual framework

  Whenever you’re shooting and editing, these are the elements you’re aiming to capture and enhance. It’s a reminder of what you’re working towards. It doesn’t matter if these words won’t mean the same to anyone else or even if they’re not real words at all. It’s a list just for you – a filter that shows what you most want to share and how you will capture it.

  It’s useful to put your style into words like this for two reasons:

  • Firstly, it’s far better for our self-belief to refer to a list of values and qualities than it is to constantly compare ourselves (usually unfavourably) to that board of perfect, best-shot, stars-in-alignment images.

  • And secondly, because these words can become an easily applied checklist to run through whenever we’re struggling to make a shot work.

  To apply your list, simply check that your creation fits into one or more of the qualities you wrote. If it doesn’t, what can you change? Is it possible to add in a missing element from the narrative to bring the picture together? Can you edit differently to bring out the right mood?

  THIS OR THAT

  If you’re struggling to think of key words that might work, run through the list below and circle which one you most identify with from each pairing. (If you really can’t choose between two words in a pair, then circle them both – there are no rules that can’t be broken!)

  Then, narrow the results down to the words that feel most important and reflective of you and what you hope to create.

  VINTAGE / MODERN

  COLOURFUL / MUTED

  CHEERFUL / MELANCHOLY

  DETAILED / MINIMAL

  FUN / POIGNANT

  YOUNG / MATURE

  MOODY / BRIGHT

  URBAN / RURAL

  ARTISTIC / AUTHENTIC

  DARK / LIGHT

  CURATED / CASUAL

  SLOW / FAST

  FADED / SATURATED

  POPULAR / NICHE

  HONEST / STYLED

  INDOOR / OUTDOOR

  WILD / ORDERED

  HOME / AWAY

  SPONTANEOUS / PLANNED

  COOL / WARM

  FINDING YOUR NICHE

  One of the most common mistakes we can make – online, and in day-to-day life – is trying to please too many people at once. Again, this is especially true for women – we’re raised to believe that our value relies on being liked and approved of by everyone we meet.

  The problem with trying to be liked by everyone as a creator is that we wind up being bland and unremarkable – liked well enough by many, but truly loved by nobody at all. In trying to please everyone else we end up losing sight of what makes us unique. When I think about the creators I am most passionate about – authors, singers, musicians or photographers – it’s always their point of distinction that makes me adore them so strongly.

  Lean into whatever makes you different, and unique. As multi-Grammy nominated, 12-million-album-selling singer Tori Amos puts it: ‘I know I’m an acquired taste – I’m anchovies. And not everybody wants those hairy little things.’

  Everyone likes Margherita pizza well enough, but not in the same way that some people love anchovy pizza. Trust that in being yourself, you’ll attract your true audience – and with over 800 million users currently on Instagram (and growing fast), that there’s enough to go round for everyone.

  That said, it’s important not to be too restrictive, either. On social media, we often see super-niche accounts grow incredibly quickly – ones dedicated to a pet, for example, or to recreating the same shot again and again. This can be a lot of fun, but in the long run has the risk of becoming quite restrictive. Owners of highly themed accounts often find they’re unable to post anything different or evolve their work as they outgrow their original theme.

  For that reason, I always encourage people to leave enough space to wriggle and grow within their niche, in order to future-proof the account they are building.

  EXERCISE

  Listening to yourself

  JOURNALING PROMPTS

  Below is a list of journaling prompts to help you dig into what makes you tick. If you’re anything like me you’re probably planning on just skim-reading these questions then skipping ahead – I get it, I do, but I encourage you to go find a piece of paper, or open your smartphone notes, and actually give your brain the time and space to write these answers. We’re so good at drowning out intuition in our daily life, so giving yourself 10 or 15 minutes to actually listen can feel like a creative awakening all in itself.

  • What are you passionate about?

  What are your specialist subjects or obsessions?

  What are you inclined to get a bit ranty about if the topic comes up?

  • What makes you different from the other people in your life?

  What are your unusual or unpopular opinions?

  What parts of you do you feel like nobody else around you gets?

  • What would you create if you couldn’t see the numbers?

  • What colours most resonate with you?

  Look to your wardrobe and interiors if you struggle with this.

  • When do you feel most like your true self?

  This is a physically expansive feeling – like you have room to stretch out and grow.

  • When do you feel trapped or confined?

  This is the opposite – a claustrophobic feeling, like you’re being restrained or made small.

  • A favourite photograph I’ve taken is…

  • I love it because…

  • I’m inspired by… (things that make you want to create.)

  • I’m distracted by… (things that throw you off path.)

  Keep in mind that your creative voice and what it wants you to create might be totally different from anything you’ve created so far. If you’ve already got an Instagram account and you’ve never considered these questions before, it might mean a sudden change of direction – that’s totally f
ine, and nothing to worry about. Or perhaps you’re already nailing a lot of your creative style, and your answers will just help you pinpoint a few areas where you can refine it and be more streamlined and definite in your approach. There are no rights or wrongs here.

  EXAMPLE ANSWERS

  Here’s how a client, Josie, answered these questions when we worked together.

  • What are you passionate about?

  Home, family, decorating and my friends.

  • What makes you different from the other people in your life?

  I’m obsessive about creating a beautiful home. I know most people think it’s superficial or silly but I believe it really impacts on how we live, and can help us live the lives we really want with our families.

  • What would you create if you couldn’t see the numbers?

  I’d probably share more pictures of my home and more creative pictures of my kids.

  But I worry what my friends would think – I usually just share snaps of the kids from days out or things I’ve bought for the house.

  • What colours most resonate with you?

  White, green, sand and metallics.

  • When do you feel most like your true self?

  When I’m in a space I’ve designed and decorated. When I’m in nature.

  • When do you feel trapped or confined?

  When I’m in a space that is poorly designed or decorated, like a bad hotel or my friend’s cluttered house (I’m not judging her, it just stresses me out!).

  • A favourite photograph I’ve taken is…

  The portrait of my kids in the kitchen making breakfast.

  • I love it because… it’s my two best creations, the kitchen and my babies, all together. It’s lovely and bright and shows how the right space can make moments like this possible.

  We never did things like that together in the old flat!

  • I’m inspired by… Pinterest, photo recipe books, being in nature, the Ikea catalogue!

  • I’m distracted by… other people’s Instagrams and what my friends are posting or might think of my photos. Also the photos everyone takes on Instagram like blossom trees and food!

  DO SOMETHING WORTH PHOTOGRAPHING

  Some days your life just doesn’t feel Instagram-worthy. Hell, nobody is photo ready all the time, and nor should we be – but when our daily life fails to inspire us, it can stifle creativity as well.

  If you find yourself in this situation, my advice is this: do something worth photographing.

  • Bake a cake

  • Make soup

  • Take a walk

  • Buy yourself flowers

  • Build a gorgeous cardboard puppet theatre with the kids

  For a long time I got hung up on the question of whether it was vanity to do things just so I could take pictures of them, and if this somehow made me a terrible person. Eventually I realized: our lives are made up of the things that we do, not the reasons we get started on doing those things. Do something often enough and it becomes who you are.

  Does it matter that you only started dressing the table for dinner because it looked nicer in photographs? When you’re eating cake instead of hiding under the duvet on the sofa, I think you’ll agree. Motivation is motivation, and we should take it wherever we can get it.

  There is however one important caveat. Do it for the photo, for the art, for the creativity – but never for the likes. Following a path to social media validation and points is a slippery slope, and an easy way to lose all sense of self and why we are creating in the first place. If you find yourself falling into this trap, visit the later pages on engagement and community (see here), and focus on finding an audience that loves the same things as you.

  EXERCISE

  Go on a photo walk

  Pull on your shoes, charge up your camera and head out of your front door – we’re going on a photo walk.

  Exploring the world through a lens can often help us see with a new perspective – small details can be magnified, and stories reveal themselves.

  If you struggle to get into this mindset, a good way to jumpstart is to walk along literally looking at your screen! Turn on live view mode on your DSLR, use the flip screen on your point-and-shoot, or simply activate the camera on your smartphone and use that as your window to the world.

  Something magical happens when we frame reality like this – four solid black lines forming a rectangle around everything we see. Suddenly, everything becomes a picture, and it’s a whole lot easier to tell the interesting ones from the not.

  THINGS TO LOOK OUT FOR:

  Tiny details / confetti on a pavement / a single flower in a sea of grass. Include something like your feet to give a sense of scale, and use your camera’s macro mode if you have it to capture the fine detail.

  Unexpected things and juxtapositions / a daisy growing out of an old cement wall / brightly coloured balloons caught in a dead winter tree.

  Little stories of life / a glowing amber window on a cold winter’s evening / a child’s chalk drawings on the grey pavements of a terraced street.

  Seasonal stories / autumn leaves underfoot / the first frost on a windowpane / colourful umbrellas in the rain / a sea of spring flowers at the park. Seasons tend to feel most miraculous at their beginning and end for those of us lucky enough to experience them, but to folks living in the opposite hemisphere or in a fairly static year-round climate, these glimpses of nature’s evolution are like a mini Insta safari.

  Insta gold / pretty houses / bushes in full bloom / a great shop window / a photogenic cat. Sometimes a cliché is a cliché for good reason – because they’re pleasing to look at, and worth holding onto.

  Moments of life / what you bought at the florist / the tea from your local cafe / the letter as you push it into the post box / the shopping bag whose handles split, spilling oranges across the pavement / the book you borrowed from the library.

  Different perspectives / watch your feet as you walk / look up to the skies and the rooftops of the buildings around you / crouch down and look at things from a kid’s or cat’s eye view / share what you find along the way. Don’t expect the best scenes or moments to necessarily jump out at you. You’ve likely walked these streets a hundred times already – to see them with fresh eyes, change your perspective in the literal sense and get to a new eye-level.

  Unexpected beauty / some particularly poetic graffiti / a rainbow of electrical cables spilling out from a service box / a dirty pigeon bathing in a roadside puddle. Sometimes the best magic can be found in the stuff that other people overlook. Clichéd as it may sound, there really is beauty in everything, and training your eye to see it makes for a much more colourful life.

  NB: You know you’ve perhaps taken this one too far when you find yourself, like me, reaching for the camera upon discovering a perfectly heart-shaped bird poop. #NoSara #Justno.

  If that last pointer has you hiding behind your hands, you’re not alone. It’s incredibly common when starting out to be afraid of what other people might think – it’s scary and vulnerable to try something new and unusual in public!

  Here’s what I tell myself when those feelings hit:

  1. I’ll regret walking away from the picture more than I ever regret taking it. Believe me, you remember the amazing pictures you missed for life, but nobody remembers the random stranger who gave them a bit of side eye in the street.

  2. We’re just guessing what other people will think! Despite how it might sometimes feel, we don’t actually know what someone thinks unless they tell us – otherwise it’s all just assumption and fear talking. Yes, someone might find it a little surprising – but someone else might find it incredibly inspiring and take it as permission to try their own thing out too! How can we possibly know?

  3. ‘It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar’ – Anaïs Nin. If someone’s alarmed by you doing something a little bit different, that’s on them, and not a burden we should be carrying for them. If yo
u’re not hurting anyone or getting in people’s way, there’s really no reason for folks to mind. We can’t please everyone, and it’s foolish to try.

  MAKING PICTURES

  COMPOSITION IS KEY

  We make images to see clearly, then we see clearly what we have made.

  Wright Morris

  It’s one thing to find the pictures we want to take. Making the result on the screen accurately reflect what we are seeing can be another skill entirely – what to include, what to leave out, what the light is doing, what the angles mean.

  When I was little I used to dream of taking pictures with my eyes. A long, slow blink to capture anything, exactly as I could see it, with none of the difficulty of finding a camera and persuading it to play along. I could never understand why the pictures I took on my camera – a yellow plastic one I’d received as a gift after having my birthday party at a fast-food restaurant – weren’t as wonderful as the scene I’d had before me at the time.

  The truth is, our eyes do only half the work. When we look at a scene – a smiling infant, a colourful parade, steam curling from a coffee mug in a shaft of afternoon sunlight – our brain does a series of complicated manoeuvres to enhance our focus.

  In Speech Therapy I was taught that babies cannot distinguish background noise from important voices. It’s why having the TV or radio playing can be bad for an infant’s language development; they miss precious exposure to their mother’s speech among the hum of household activity.

  In many ways a camera shares this naive, open approach to the world. Our camera has no discernment or filter for what is of interest or what is before it. Like the eyes, it simply sees – it is up to us, with our brains, to control, filter and adjust what it records. To make sense of the chaos and tease out the meaning.

  In this chapter we’ll get into the practicalities of doing that – with whatever camera you have at your disposal, and whatever skills you already possess.