vsco aesthetics // back to my roots

I have said it many times, but Instagram has become a place where every photographer is copying another, where everyone is jumping on trends, where everyone is too focused on the "perfect photo", and every photographer is too concerned with what everyone likes / wants to see. There was barely any photos or photographers that would inspire me there anymore. There was simply nothing creative, or aesthetically pleasing to me. Nothing weird. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just safe photos of cityscapes, and boring portraits. 

Of course, I was no exception to this. I found that my portraits were getting boring, and hence I stopped taking portraits for the most part. Just a different model, and a different backdrop, but the same posing and the same framing. Rinse and repeat. What even was I doing anymore? This was never the photography that I wanted. Sure, I did some really cool concepts. The all pink shoot with Michelle was amazing. The 'I hate u, I love u' concept I did with Nehe and Bev was also fairly interesting. My recent shoot with Megan at Hawpar Villa was also a little weird and retro. But apart from those, all of my other shoots were simply boring. 

And being deprived of inspirations made it harder to create. 

I found myself on VSCO editing some phone shots. I decided to take a scroll through VSCO's feed since it's been years since I last did that. And I was blown away. What really amazed me was that even after all these years, VSCO was still curating photos that they felt were aesthetically pleasing. These photos did not belong to any one genre or aesthetic. They varied from style to style. There were many weird concepts for portraits, there were photos of random objects on the floor, random aesthetics. For once in years, I was actually inspired. "This was what I've been searching so desperately for", I thought to myself. 

I'd always taken a weird approach with my photography when I first started. Photos of chairs, of brooms, of flower pots, of slabs of meat found on the floor. But Instagram changed me to conform to all these "perfect" shots. Because it was all that I saw, it narrowed my mind and perspectives so much. Being on VSCO widened my perspectives again, and I've been scrolling through the feed to find more and more inspiration. I don't think I'll be doing much portraits in future, to avoid boring photos, unless I have some weird concepts I want to try. But mostly, I want to get back to my old VSCO aesthetics, taking random photos of this and that. Capturing fleeting moments on both my phone and on my camera. It's hard to explain what this aesthetic is, but basically, I've decided to say screw what everyone thinks. What matters is that I like what I'm shooting.