One can tell a lot about a person’s personality by their Instagram feed. Sometimes, I stumble come across an all colour-matching, immaculately presented Instagram feed with a full-screen mosaic of a photographer’s style and specific imagery. These peoples’ desktop homepage will be devoid of any miscellaneous files or documents. They probably don’t have desktops with images stacked on top of one another, fighting for airtime, like a game of solitaire that has got out of hand, and they definitely don’t have folders named ‘untitled’ within folders named ‘untitled’. If you glance at my Instagram, you’ll probably guess which camp I’m in.
My Instagram profile is a random mix of different genres and mediums. It resembles one of those 90’s optical illusions you do with your eyes crossed. However, there’s a very good reason for this…
I love photography and videography. I’m interested in so many different genres that I purposely go out of my way to photograph and film different subjects. Why would I constrain myself to one subject when I can enjoy photographing lots of them?! I’m just as happy with my face in the mud photographing a grasshopper through my macro lens as I am setting up a tripod at 4am on a Dorset hilltop, waiting for the first rays of sunlight to paint across my scene or capturing a split-second moment at a wedding. In a nutshell, I love to simply create imagery with my camera.
By not specialising I’m able to not only have fun and have a diverse portfolio, but I’ve also been able to amalgamate the skills I’ve learnt photographing each genre into photographing each genre! For example, my wedding photography employ skills learned from my travel, wildlife and landscape photography. My documentary-style of wedding photography helps me with storytelling when filming my photography travel films. They are all intertwined, it has definitely shaped my style of my photography. Saying all that, my most recent addiction are my fine-art abstract textures. Yes, it’s pretty niche I know. It has almost zero transferable skills into my other photography. These are purely my way of doing something completely different, both photographically and in terms of seeing the world.
This new venture is a huge part of my business, not in a monetary sense, as I’m still in the early stages of building my portfolio, but as a creative outlet. It keeps me on my toes, it keeps me ‘creatively inspired’. It’s incredibly easy to continuously plod along doing the photography that pays the bills, but by not specialising in a specific field, I have freedom to create content that I’m interested in. By having these side projects, it keeps my photography as a whole, fresh and exciting and the prospect of any of these projects becoming a larger part of my business excites me. I’ll be the first to admit that I get bored easily, but I also become hugely driven in the things that I am passionate about, and if I can keep that drive by extending my knowledge, extending my vision, that surely it is a worthwhile project to maintain.
I believe, by consciously being aware of my innate personality traits and flaws enables me to follow the path that works for me and my somewhat, quoting my wife here, ‘impulsive’ personality instead of fighting it.
