This changed how my clients saw me

There is a moment I keep coming back to.

I was on a call with a client, going through the usual questions about dates and logistics, when she said something almost in passing: that she had seen my work months earlier, saved it, and kept coming back to it before finally writing to me. Surprisingly she said that what hooked her was the power my images carry, specially the color tone I use.

Wow. That was the reason she wanted to be me in the project!

I remember sitting there afterwards thinking about how long it had taken me to build the thing she had just described in one sentence.

The years nobody sees

For a long time, my photos looked like other people’s photos (you probably go through the same issue).

Not badly, exactly. Technically they were fine. But if you had put them next to a hundred other travel and wildlife images from that year, you would not have been able to pick mine out. There was nothing that said this is hers.

Does it happens to you as well?

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So I chased. Warm and faded one season, teal and orange the next. Every photo edited from zero, in a slightly different direction depending on my mood that evening. The result was a feed that looked like four photographers sharing one account lol

My instagram grid before:

Pretty bad, oh well…. ok. So, I was shooting in places that challenges you big time as a photographer, like polar ice, open ocean, rainforest, desert...! If you know you know, every one of them does something different to light, and I was solving each problem from scratch, over and over.

The shift came when I stopped asking how should I edit this photo and started asking what should my photos feel like.

The second question has an answer that applies to everything. Now when I come back with two thousand frames from ice and water and land, they arrive somewhere consistent.

Like this:

Much better, hey? And that consistency is the whole thing. It’s what makes a stranger recognise your work before they see your name on it 🙌🏽

This is my instagram today, different environments, consistent look:

If you’re at the beginning, here’s the trap I want to save you from.

You’ll assume that finding your look is a matter of taste, and that taste arrives eventually, so you keep experimenting. Every photo becomes a new attempt. And because nothing carries forward, you never compound.

Photographers who seem to have found their identity early usually haven’t found anything mystical. They’ve found a system, a small set of decisions made the same way every time, so their energy goes into the seeing rather than into rebuilding the same color work at midnight.

There’s nothing dishonest about starting from a foundation someone else built. What matters is what you do on top of it.

I built my presets over years in the field because nothing existing handled these environments properly, especially underwater (!!), where the water swallows red first and most presets simply give up. With all respect, most of them are really bad.

It became four packs, thirty-one presets:

Underwater — 10 presets, colour-corrected and vivid, built for what water does to light.

Polar Signature — 7 presets. Deep aqua blues, clean light, vast open space.

Cinematic Feels — 7 presets. Warm, textured, story-driven.

Black & White — 7 presets, two of them underwater. High contrast, subject and nothing else.

As you can see, huge difference. And it took me only 15s now with the Maya - Polar Signature preset.

✅ Lightroom Mobile and Desktop, one click, fully adjustable: a starting point you make yours.

✅ Installation guide included.

If you shoot wildlife, travel, portraits or underwater, and you’d rather spend this year building recognition than rebuilding the same edit a thousand times — the full collection is $128 instead of $160. Twenty percent off the individual packs, and the closest thing I can offer to bringing you inside my editing process.

Get the Complete Preset Collection →

Tag me so I can come say hi.

For the wild,

Maya

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