Allow Yourself Space to Be Uncomfortable

ALLOW YOURSELF SPACE

TO BE UNCOMFORTABLE

By Renée Robyn

COLORED GELS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A MYSTERY FOR ME. IT’S SOMETHING I LOVE TO LOOK AT, BUT I RARELY ALLOW MYSELF TIME TO PLAY, MOSTLY BECAUSE I JUST DON’T GET IT. EVERYTHING FROM SUBTLE COLOR USE TO HEAVY-HANDED WORK, IT’S ALWAYS KIND OF ELUDED ME. AS A RESULT, I FORCE THE UNCOMFORTABLE AND I PUT MYSELF INTO THE STUDIO WITH MODELS WHO ARE UNDERSTANDING OF MY ANGSTY PUTTERING ABOUT.

What I’m doing is creating safe spaces for myself to fail and fail a lot. It’s the photography version of those rooms where you pay money to put on a pair of old smelly coveralls, grab a bat, and just break stuff for the afternoon. That’s what I’m doing to my brain. After all these years of creating fancy pixels, I have a box in there: These rules of “how it’s supposed to be” when I walk into the studio. There are benefits to this. When a client shows up and they want “X” I can roll up on two hours of jet-lagged sleep and deliver “X”. That’s kind of what a professional is, and I spent many years perfecting that formula. It’s what amateur me dreamed about when I first picked up a camera and when I turned it on, filled with anticipation laced with anxiety. Eventually there comes a time when the systems we have in place go from being guiding lights to barriers and window bars. We need to create a room where we can simply break stuff with reckless abandon, or I do at the very least. I call upon my trusty friends who understand the creative process. Typically, they are artists themselves and allow me space to break the boundaries within my own head. Instead of using the pattern I normally set up the lights, I flip it around.

The big modifiers I normally use stay in their boxes, and I clean the dust off my small ones. I remove all my usual creative comforts and allow myself to create some abysmal mistakes. Strange lenses, weird apertures, colors that sometimes hurt my eyeballs, and styling that normally would never enter my mind. How many or how few lights can I use to achieve a result that I hadn’t known was possible? As always, I ensure my play session with starting in my comfort zone, the shallow end of the creative pool. Should my pixel finger painting turn into digital landfill, I know that my willing and patient subjects have something worth taking home, their time has been well spent. Even when financial gains are offered, I always want to be considerate of their time and talent as well. I want them to go home feeling like the day was a success, regardless of the results of experimentation. I find that creating safe spaces for myself to fail, allows my career to be fun again. It gives me space to be unknowing of a result that in many areas I am quite secure in the results I desire. Suddenly I am a toddler again, fingers smashing into paints and joyfully decorating the walls while parental units are unaware.

Renée Robyn

Growing up surrounded by the vast prairie of the Canadian north and tales of faraway places, Renée Robyn has chased the perfect backdrop around the world. Approaching photography like a treasure hunter, her compositions are uniquely cinematic, often becoming pieces of a bigger world represented beyond reality. Renée’s style is easily recognizable and distinctly her own. Expertly blending fact, fiction, and a little digital alchemy, she has worked with industry-leading brands like Wacom, Viewsonic, Corel, Capture One and Intel. Comfortable facing down gale force winds, climbing fog-shrouded mountains or fast pace commercial studios, her work is impressive and committed. An expert retoucher, Renée applies the same level of commitment to post-processing leveraging her mastery of colour theory, editing, light, and shadow in the digital realm of Photoshop. Renée Robyn Photography lectures have been presented around the world, including PhotoPlus, WPPI, Photokina, Creative Live, ProEdu and more.