The Art of Capturing Authenticity

Standing out from other media professionals requires work speaking for itself, louder than you could ever verbally advocate for, similar to creating video, photo, editing, writing, and website marketing work.  I’ve learned there’s millions of professionals doing the same thing, standing out from the crowd.  So how do you style your work that way to do so? 

You don’t, you turn yourself into a storyteller. 

Capturing the subject's story and having your work invoke a reaction in any viewer is the greatest style you could ever have.  Photos I took of a couple during engagement photos in Brenham, Texas for wedding work stood out to me.  Allowing the couple to take me across their property, and framing their love. 

As they are nature lovers I had them leaning on trees, standing on hay barrels, and walking through hedge mazes.  As they showed a deep love emanating through their eyes. Even with all this direction I never told them to pose.  Posing in my direction is pointless, posing in the subject’s direction is all you’ll ever need.  

This applies further with models I’ve worked with on wedding shoots, allowing the models to be themselves.  I distinctly remember working with both wedding dress models on a lengthy single day shoot.  Putting models in areas they instantly wanted to be in across the property we were shooting.  As I feel putting your subject in areas they want to hasten the way they truly express themselves.  Further telling the subject to simply express how they feel when they put the dress on, as opposed to any forced emotion. 

Telling the subject to slow down with movements, then when you feel like you’ve slowed down as much as you can; slows you down even more.  It allows for photos and videos of the person filmed to evoke subtle natural emotion that gradually changes either over the course of the video or the photo gallery.