Anustart

If you’re reading this, hello for starters, but it means that this site is finally live and public. Okay so you may have already noticed a few blog entries already on here, that’s mostly because this started life as a TAFE assessment and I’ve decided to carry it forward and hopefully be filling it with more work as the weeks go by.

I feel like the blog is going to be primarily reflections on my photography work where I talk about the shoots, their content, technical geekery, and/or musings and critics of photos I’ve produced. I’ll try and keep it constant but it’s not a promise I can keep.

But first let’s talk about branding… or should I say why I kinda suck at it.

Whilst I’ve had a web presence for a long time under the branding of Fanboy Crossing (later Fandom Crossing, told you I wasn’t good at this) I wasn’t entirely comfortable using that for my photography, however that isn’t the start of the journey on reflection. This story begins with a company called Helios E, a custom prop and costume manufacturer owned by my close friend Jon Goon who I worked for at the start of the shop’s founding. I worked there for 5 months in Malaysia and eventually had to return to Australia, but the hope was to create a sister service down under which lead to….

*Logo by me based on a logo by someone else (probably Jon).*

I tried to do everything I did over in Malaysia, offer a good service making custom props at a reasonable price, and hoped it would lead to something I could build upon and even hire local builders to make some awesome stuff…. it didn’t work. Helios AU ran on NEIS for one year, out of my own pocket for another year, and after six months of not even getting a single commission I decided to quietly pull the plug.

After a couple of years trying to find a paying job, filling my time with charity work and even doing courses to get me work in fields like Data Entry, I tripped into this idea of furthering my fledgling photography career. I was stuck for idea on making a social media presence for myself (again not wanting to use previous brands to keep it focused), and so I decided to evolved my brand further to keep it separated (hey-a-a!)

*It took a long time to make sure this logo didn’t look like an orange dictator.*

I wanted some visual ties to the previous brand, recycling fonts and kerning, etc, but with a photography twist. Initially I wanted to use the elements from the AU sun logo and turn them into an iris from a lens, elements you can see still used in the final image, but the colours just never looked right. I switched to a blue and yellow/orange for contrast an rearranged the elements which ended up looking like a landscape as a logo.

Truth be told whilst I liked the concept and design I never truly felt it represented my photography style, worried it would misconstrue me as a nature or landscape photographer, but I pushed past those fears and hope the content would convey the message more.

When I finally looked into this brand I did a casual google search and couldn’t find any working photographers with the name, and couldn’t see anything in the social medias and business names so I adopted the brand. Trouble initially happened when I couldn’t properly use '‘heliosphotos’ as my facebook name despite there being no other person using it on the platform, but I just ignored it and went ahead and set up my page.

I had long since abandoned any idea of using instagram so I didn’t bother to check that and the url I wanted was available but I thought I’d wait until I was established enough to buy and save some money. Probably a dumb decision but probably in hindsight for the better as one year later I couldn’t register it, as not only did I find someone had already started operating under the name but even a local photography has been using that name for quite some time…. so time to move on.

Well I guess the top banner is a spoiler as to where this landed but it wasn’t without some frustration, annoyance, frustration, questioning, frustration, and ultimately blind luck.

I won’t go into the list of names and attempts at trying to find a new branding that I felt worked for me at my current state of mind and aesthetic, but believe me when I say took some time to find this name and place… and more importantly something unique enough to tie together as a website name, a FB name, and a instagram name (yes I’m going to try and post there).

The logo itself is from one of my first fails attempts and trying to rebrand but I fell in love with it and it had to stay. It represents a f/11 aperture lens opening, something I’ve been defaulting to a lot with my night photography, therein also points to the other reason I choose that name.

I might go into it more at some point but I think I’ve waffled on enough, hell I’d be surprised if you made it through this far. You deserve a cookie, just not from me.

S

A Blast from the Past.

Alison Jackson and the Girl’s Night In.