I rather enjoy sharing my personal thoughts. Yet it looks like it’s been 3 months since I last posted something in the “personal” category. Golly.

Even more bleak is the fact that the pictures I’m about to share were taken over 4 months ago. Oops.

Anyway, I’m so pleased to finally be back on track with my editing (Thank you winter!) and this means hopefully there will be plenty more of these kind of posts to follow soon :)

I thought today I’d share my thoughts on following trends.

I have this strange fear of being a trend follower. It’s not that I’m a rebel at all. I’m probably more of a people-pleaser than anything else. Yet I have this very strong desire to be original.

I guess I want to be the creator of my ideas, and by following trends I allow someone else to be the creator.

Yes, I hear you, “Tabitha, where exactly are you going with this?”.

So lately I’ve really been struggling with this idea of finding a photographic style. When I asked people to describe it for me, I got words like, “airy”, “light”, and “romantic”. And yes, that is probably a fair description of my work. But it made me think about what I actually WANT my style to be. You see, when I allow my eyes to wander onto other photographer’s blogs, I so often leave feeling inadequate. Suddenly my documentation is not good enough, my compositions suck. I am not creative. My editing is baaaad. And it seems I’m not the only one who feels like this. We all know that saying about comparison being a thief. It really is.

And then when I’m taking pictures I find myself thinking, “how would so-and-so shoot this?” Or when I’m editing, “how do I get it to look more like THAT photographer’s work”. And without realising it, I end up doing exactly that which I dislike so much. I follow trends. I allow someone else to set the standard of what makes good photography.

And that scares me. Because trends don’t last. In two to three years, whatever is cool right now will be so outdated then.

And those thoughts again lead me to having some sort of identity crisis about my style.

So what I’ve been thinking about is not so much how I can shoot or edit my photos in a more timeless way or even how I can make them be more TRULY ME. Rather, I choose to think of how despite the changing trends, I can focus on creating photographs that will mean something to my clients. My aim should not be for my clients to get their pictures back and think, “Wow, I love this effect”, or “That’s a great angle”. And quite frankly it shouldn’t really matter whether or not they remember who was behind the lens when the picture was taken. Rather, I want them to think, “Hey, I look so happy”, and ultimately I want to take photos that in some way will remind people of how much they love their spouses, their mothers, their grannies, and hopefully to look at themselves and think, “I am created beautifully”.

So it doesn’t matter whether I do or don’t know how to use my flash off my camera. Or whether I used a VSCO preset to edit your images or not. What does matter, is that I tried my very best to capture the joy and beauty of your day and the love you have for those you share it with.  And yes, I will use good light as a tool to achieve that. I WILL keep improving my knowledge of how to take interesting photographs. I will continue to experiment, and hopefully to push some creative boundaries. But that will not be my end. My end is to make use of a talent I was given by MY CREATOR (Because really, I am NOT the creator and everything I will ever do will only ever be a reflection of something SO MUCH GREATER) and hopefully He will use this to be a blessing to others.

Sorry, was that all a bit cheesy? Oops, didn’t mean to go there. But I did and I meant every word ;)

But really all of that was a bit of an excuse to share some pictures I took. Or maybe sharing the pictures is an excuse  to share my thoughts. Either way, they don’t really relate to each other.

These pictures are of the lovely Angelina. Angelina is one of 8 incredible children. They have a most special story and I hope to be able to photograph them all one day. This was a fairly spontaneous shoot with my German photographer friend Julia Winkler that was meant to take place at the beach, but due to it getting dark after 10 minutes (Talk about bad time-management!), we ended up migrating to the waterfront. We used my little video light and what’s rad is how we used it so differently in our pictures. My standard of what looks good in a picture is different to her standard and vice versa. And that’s cool. Hope you like the pictures, folks. Thanks for reading my essay.