Today we talked with Kaley from Kansas about SO much, but the heart of the conversation lies in how she’s able to capture imagery that evokes feeling and emotion, and how she’s built a photography business over the years that has allowed her to capture human beings in a real, honest, fine art way that makes her truly one of a kind. We ask her how she got started in her photography journey, and what her opinion is on having a niche as she is known for shooting couples, weddings, families, newborns, and editorial artistic portraits. 

Kaley gives tangible tips on things she does on a shoot that help her make space for her clients to be comfortable, how she thinks of composition when creating art, and how she created the artwork she most connected with even at the beginning of her business when the clients coming to her weren’t necessarily the kind that understood or valued her style just yet. Aka what do you do when trying to create art on a session but a kid is wearing a mickey mouse shirt that’s distracting? 

 

Kaley’s Story

If you don’t know who Kaley is, Kaley from Kansas is a documentary wedding and family photographer based in Kansas City, traveling worldwide. Her imagery focuses on light, connection, composition, and feeling, and wowza is she dang good at just that. Kaley is also an educator, teaching heart-forward documentation and inspiration to photographers. 

Kaley’s photography journey

For the first couple of years, Kaley was just shooting film in college, and in the four years of college, she didn’t get into digital until her senior year. Kaley was primarily messing around with film, doing different projects, still lives, and not even really shooting people. Kaley slowly started to get into digital and continued to mess around with scenes and landscapes, she was the girl that would make her friends model for her. She would ask her friends to dress up, so the fashion piece was still there even that far back. During college she still wasn’t doing much shooting, then her senior year her friend asked her to do her wedding. After that wedding, she realized how much she loves love and it just snowballed from there. 

Niching Down: 

Kaley personally loves doing everything. She’s always liked having a creative outlet and then a serving job. People who are niched might not have given themselves the opportunity to try something else. They have been so inundated with weddings they don’t have a free minute to try anything else. Or maybe they have and love doing one thing. 

Kaley always prioritizes and infuses her core values into every subject matter to have them all come together. If you try different things that you don’t like then you know, but if you never try you won’t ever know. Ultimately you can do more than one thing, you need to find those values and what you pick out from all your work to tie them all together. 

 

Capturing emotions and evoking feelings through images

For Kaley so much of getting emotion out of people is creating an intentional environment. Creating comfort and being able to make them comfortable, is hard but personality alone plays such a huge role. Owning your personality is key. You can connect with someone over anything, it can be so surface but can also go deeper. It’s creating an environment where you’re not even posing them, you’re just observing them. 

 

Creating Art

You don’t want to curate someone’s life, you don’t want to be in control of their life, you want to be in control of your eye and what you’re using to shoot them. You are observing this family, there are things that moms inherently do that is incredible to see over and over but are done so differently. You can still anticipate it happening, to capture it. They don’t know until they see it, so sometimes you might have to do some weird things and then show them. Carving out time at the end of the shoot to try something a little different. 

Advocate for your clients, but also don’t force it if they are over it. 

 

What is the biggest lesson you have learned in business?

Prioritize your mental health. That goes hand in hand with recognizing your own value. And don’t be afraid to ask for help. 

 

 

Show notes

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www.instagram.com/kaleyfromkansas

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