How to Create a Consistent Instagram Aesthetic
Something that I often get asked is how I create a consistent aesthetic on my Instagram grid. Honestly, it’s mostly down to my slight obsession with playing around with my planning app, but I thought I’d share my tips so I can direct everyone to this page when I get asked questions. Personally, I love to see a curated grid that looks like a little gallery of the person’s work, organised with themes and colours, but there’s also a growing trend for creating a more natural-looking feed that looks more dis-organised and chaotic. Each to their own, but I’m not one for chaos.
I organise my grid in my head even when I’m out and about with my camera. I like to see it as a constantly evolving gallery of my photography and keep a consistent colour palette that stays prominent throughout most of my work. I take photos of what catches my eye, but I also keep one eye on the lookout for themes that I am currently missing from my catalogue of work - whether that is colours, subjects or particular compositions. I like to keep my grid looking warm and typically stay away from the colour blue. I like gold, beige, rust, pink and green tones, and add darkness with shadows. I often have a backlog of rusty hues, adding a self portrait with my red hair if I’m at a loss, but hunting down elements of pink can sometimes be a challenge - especially in winter.
When I have uploaded recently shot photos onto my phone, I edit them using Lightroom and sometimes adding the M5 filter on VSCO. I don’t always add the filter, but when I do I drag the slider quite far down so it looks more natural. I always stick to the same filter to keep my images looking consistent. Even if I’m editing an image that looks awful with this filter on full blast, adding the smallest hint can help it to fit in with the rest of my feed.
Once edited, I upload my favourite images onto my planning app (I use UNUM) where I typically spend too much time moving them around. Sometimes I add images that I love onto the app and realise that they just don’t work on my feed, so they end up on my Stories instead. I tend to move the order of the photographs around a lot, changing things up every time I add in a new batch of images. I also leave blank squares if I feel like I’m missing a particular colours, subject or composition from what I currently have available - this helps me to plan what I need to shoot.
When I look back over my Instagram grid, I can see my aesthetic evolving and can easily note the points where it became more consistent. Over the past couple of years, I’ve taken two e-courses that helped me to refine my aesthetic - Gloom & Glow and Lost in the Light. Working through these courses really helped me to look at my photography in a different way and to refine the style of my images. I learned that I didn’t have to change the way I shoot dependent on the time of year, the weather or the subject matter; I could keep my photography looking consistent.
The best advice that I could give to others looking to create a consistent aesthetic would be to figure out what you want your photography to look like. Create a mood board of images that you like and work out what they all have in common. Analyse the way that you already shoot and work out how you have evolve your own work to become closer to what you want your aesthetic to be without losing your personal flourish. Perhaps you are almost there, you just need to refine the colours that you focus on or the brightness of your images. For my work, I realised that I could bring light into the dark images that I loved by playing around with focus, adding touches of pink and always paying attention to where the light was coming from.
If you have any questions about creating a consistent look to your photography and curating your Instagram grid, write a comment in the box below and I’ll do my best to answer!