Blog by Kristina Kasparian Veni Etiam Photography

Your places, my lens: Why I love custom requests

19/9/2017

From Day One, my shop's motto has been "from my heart to yours", because of all the places, colors and moods I share with you in my words and photographs. But it especially comes from my heart when clients ask me whether I could take a particular photo of a place that means a lot to them.

When I first created my business, I knew that customization was an important feature of my art shop - I wanted you to find yourself, your travels, your dreams and decor tastes in my images and in all the options you could select to create a piece for your space. But I somehow didn't imagine that through connections and dialogues with you online and in person, I could also be asked to create photographs of places I had not captured yet before. A place you ask about obviously means something to you - and if it means something to you, it means something to me.

This summer, a client asked me whether I had photographs of two Montreal spots that were special to her family - the Farine Five Roses factory building and the clock tower at the Old Port.

These were two spots her late father adored, and she wanted prints of them in her home, to remind her of him daily.

These were two landmarks I had not yet photographed in a way that made me feel like adding them to my shop. It could partly be because I did not feel attached to them in a profound way, or also because I knew many other talented artists in our Montreal community had done such an amazing job at capturing them. But this client asked me to photograph these landmarks in my own style, because she loved the feeling of my work, and she wanted it to be meaningful in memory of her father. So, I set out to find my voice with these landmarks and to prepare a whole bunch of prints that she could then choose from.

When I showed her the scenes I had collected for her, she was touched. She loved the mood of one of the Farine Five Roses shots, and the composition of the photograph of the Clock Tower. "It's like it's pointing up at the sky, to my Dad," she wrote. That touched me so much, that I dedicated the print's caption (on the insert that accompanies each print) to her and her dad.

That is the beauty of creating something one-of-a-kind, something that touches someone's heart and represents a piece of their story. Moments like these make me feel really blessed to have this artistic outlet to inspire you. In turn, I am always astonished and grateful of how you inspire me in return, with your own vision, your own story and your words. Thank you for this gift.

Together, we put together a gallery wall of seven prints for this lovely client, the two commissions being unique to her wall, as they have not been added to my online shop.

Some of the other variations have been added to my art shop and my Etsy shop, and I will have them with me for the first time this weekend at the Etsy Fait au Quebec Montreal show.