A familiar face came back to our studio recently. For those of you who may not know who Robyn is, she came to us last year for a Glamour Experience. (Click Here to see her experience) This time, she needed two new headshots.
She had two separate needs - a casual look and a professional look. Her most important consideration was to appear trustworthy in her portraits. Below are the final two portraits she selected.
I don’t believe in doing Before & After photographs. When I first started doing glamour and beauty photography, I did them - and absolutely loved them. In fact, Before & After portraits are a staple amongst the glamour photography community. The more sessions I did though, the more I listened to how the women reacted to themselves “done up,” and therefore the more I didn’t want to do Before & After photographs.
There’s this dialogue that comes out when we put makeup on and have our hair done. It’s even as innocent as “I wish I looked like this all the time!” It doesn’t always come across with the weighted, “now I feel beautiful.” I’ve been through this transition multiple times in my life. I get caught up in the shimmer of “perfection” and start to admire the ideal. At the foundation of who I am though, the touched up, slimmed down, wrinkle-removed “ideal” is not what I see real beauty to be.
Real beauty is raw. It’s an open-armed accepting of flaws and quirks. It’s a love for the stories behind the wrinkles, grey and stretch marks. It’s an embrace of everything that someone is at their core - a naked soul. Beauty is someone who can look at themselves when they have the flu and see the weight of their value, not the sluggish color of their skin and puffy eyes. Beauty is someone who can look at themselves after first stepping out of the shower with raccoon eyes, loving what they see in themselves. Beauty is not in perfection alone, it’s in accepting yourself perfectly.
That’s why I decided to shift my focus (yet again) two years ago. I stopped doing Before & After photographs. I stopped dismissing and accepting women’s requests to take ten pounds off and remove twenty years. I stopped trying to make skin “imperfection”less and, instead, focused on lighting women in the most flattering light for their skin, only editing out the parts that aren’t always there (temporary blemishes) and only lightly finessing how they look. Most importantly, I started informing women who requested to be drastically altered from their beauty that I will do my best to bring out their beauty and that means I’ll be leaving them mostly as they are.
Since shifting back to this foundation of true beauty, I’ve seen the most incredible transformations of all - women who actually see themselves, who can see that same person in the mirror day after day and begin seeing that they are beautiful just as they are. I watch them unfurl, I share in community with them as they become vulnerable, I embrace them as they let theirselves be seen. If there’s any magic in the world, it’s to be found in the transformative beauty of the naked soul.
I had a wakeup call recently. Someone told me “Stop focusing on what you’re not” and it hit me square in the chest. I was sitting there wishing to be one of those CEO, Type-A women who always has her life together (and color coded), and is somehow always ten steps ahead of the game. I was seeing my failures in BOLD.
What was so kindly pointed to me was that what I admired about these women were their strengths. BUT just because I didn’t share those same strengths didn’t mean I did have my own strengths or my own pieces of my life together.
It’s not what I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear a “You’ll be like that someday with enough hard work.” I wrap my head up in these ideas that some day I’ll run my life “like a boss.” Really though, even if I stopped and listened to my own advice that I’ve shared with you, I already know the way back to peace and contentment.
Being strong and successful is not about matching someone else’s abilities. It’s not about making the same type of impact as another woman I admire. It’s not about pushing myself to be something. It IS about realizing that I’m built a specific way. It’s realizing I have my own strengths which I need to celebrate and not ignore or demean because they are different than what strengths I think I should have. It’s remembering that life is a journey and the “end game” isn’t even the end game. I just need to focus on being the best me. After all, I am me and I was made to make a specific difference. I have my own pace, my own path and I need to accept who I am and where I’m at.
(Sincerely,
Self)
No, really though, I’m writing this to myself and to anyone else who feels this way. Don’t just tell other people how great they are and that they have wonderful strengths. Make sure to celebrate your OWN strengths. Encourage yourself, lift yourself up, be real about what you’re going through and hold space for what’s happening in you. Be your own wakeup call.
““People describe me as elegant and fun.”
Serving another photographer through my own photography is always a treat. Maria is a wedding photographer based out of Greensboro, North Carolina who recently went through a total rebrand. She was at the stage of changing her website and she and her web designer realized she needed new “About Me” style portraits to match the total rebrand.
“People describe me as elegant and fun,” Maria said as we were discussing the tone of her new brand. Now, I’ve had the privilege of knowing Maria for about seven years now. So, I had my own perception of her. However, I wanted to step outside my own perspective and hear Maria as if I was meeting her for the first time. Then, only once I’d heard her new vision, would I marry what I knew about her into her photographs.
As a wedding professional, it was important to Maria that she appear as competent in the photographs as she is in real life. She also wanted the elegance of her new branding to translate, along with the approachable personality she has.
Her new colors were bright white, gold and black - very sleek and refined. After sending me a variety of outfits, we decided on four simple arrangements of white and black attire on which to focus. We both love how her portraits turned out!
To see how her portraits look on her newly branded site visit www.mariasollecito.com
