Our Very First Images

Hey friends!

We're getting real vulnerable today and sharing some of our first images! The goal of this post is to encourage everyone who is just starting out to keep going. One of our favorite things to do is to go to the instagram feeds of creatives that we admire and scroll back to see some of their earlier work. Often you'll see a huge transformation, and sometimes you don't even have to go back that far to see a significant difference in their work. It's really encouraging and a good reminder that developing your skills and style takes time and lots of practice. 

Now, I'm not saying all this as if we've already made it, and we're so amazing, blah blah blah. In fact, we still struggle with comparison and imposter syndrome all the time! I know we still have a long way to go, and I'm sure we'll look back on some of the images we love now and see how they could have been improved, but every time I'm discouraged in our work, it really helps to look at our very first images. The only way to get better is to simply keep creating, and it's good to keep looking back to see how far you've come! 

This is also a reminder to regularly go through your website/portfolio to add new work and clean out old work. Your portfolio is only as strong as your weakest image, and it's natural that as you grow, you'll have work that doesn't reflect you or your skills anymore. Only show the work that you want to be hired for - it's better to have less images that are strong than a lot of images that are weak. 

We thought it would be fun to not only share some of our first images as a company, but also our first images both individually and together before we started Weekend Creative. 

Let's start with some of Arabela's high school images, including one of her first product shots - a pair of converse. How many of you have folders and folders of overly processed portraits from 2008? I mean let's be real, it was the style so nothing to be ashamed of, but thank goodness we've moved away from that haha. 

Ok, now let's look at some of my earliest work. I couldn't really find much from High School. I know I have some images from that time, but to be honest I'm not great at organizing my files so who knows where they are haha. So let's fast forward to college. The first time that I knew that I loved working on shoots was when I was getting my certificate in wedding planning. I planned a wedding for a friend, and the photographer of that wedding asked me if I wanted to art direct a styled shoot with her. We teamed up and created this art nouveau styled shoot that was featured on a pretty big wedding blog. I just remember that day so vividly because it made me realize how much I loved working with my hands and collaborating with other creatives. 

In college, Arabela studied Advertising with a minor in photography. We actually met in a photography class where we spent a semester helping each other with projects including some of the ones below. I remember that I was so impressed by her setup in that last image!

While I studied graphic design in college, I took a lot of photography classes as electives and would have added a photography minor if the art department hadn't made it so difficult to add a minor haha. I ended up with an art history minor instead which is just as helpful of course. ;) Here's a few of my images from that time. One of my favorite projects I ever did was recreating Where the Wild Things Are photographically - I made all of the masks and costumes by hand! I also did a photoshoot with Arabela in my bathtub which was one of our first collaborations haha. 

During and after college, we both worked for a local magazine where we created content for social media and actually did a lot of fashion photography. This is where we really fell into our different roles of art director and photographer.

We then decided to start doing shoots on our own, completely separate from the magazine so we didn't have to worry about anyone's opinion or following rules haha. This image was from the first editorial we did completely on our own. 

Then we had the idea to reach out to local companies to see if they would give us product in exchange for images. We emailed It's-It Ice Cream and in talking with them, they said that they actually wanted to hire us! That was the moment we realized that we could actually make money off this, and while we still never thought this would be our full time business, it's the moment that we consider the birth of Weekend Creative and it was our first official paid shoot. We NEVER share these images, so you're getting a real treat. We had no idea what we were doing, we just showed up with a ton of stuff and made it up as we went which is very obvious haha. We hadn't yet developed our hard light, poppy style, and we clearly didn't know too much about post production as well as you can see from the ugly pumpkins in the halloween photo haha. We also took everything super literally. We also attempted a dripping photo which ended up just looking like smeared ice cream - yum! Enjoy!

After that shoot, we got hired by a new clothing brand to shoot their launch images. Since we had been shooting fashion, we had a little more idea what we were doing, but these images are definitely still not our best and they haven't seen the light of day in a looooong time haha. 

That shoot led to a project with Volition Beauty - this was huge for us! Again, we didn't really plan this shoot much, and the images are not cohesive at all. We had some good ideas that just didn't work out, mainly because we didn't think through them well enough. For example, I had the idea to create a white paper forrest for the product to be shot in, but it ended up looking like a hot mess haha. 

Ready for one more? Another one of our first clients was Packlane who we ended up working with over the span of about 2 years. Here's some of our very first images for them - 

Ok woo we made it! Thanks for coming along in this journey of our past images - I hope that it's encouraging to see how much we've changed and grown over the last few years. If you want to read more about how we started our business, head over to this post. 

I also want to mention that we still do work that we don't share - even though we've grown so much, there are still images that we aren't proud of. What you see in our social media is definitely a highlight reel, just like all social media accounts! 

Now that we've shared all our most embarrassing work, head over to the Weekend Club community to share your own glow-ups - we want to see how much you've grown as well!

Is it the weekend yet?
Elle