Kimberly Douglas, The Greatest One Woman Show
By: Mary Kamara
Tags: Instagram, Artist, Inspiration, Photography, Black Women

Kimberly Douglas is the best one woman show the internet could ask for.

She is a model, a creative designer, a photographer and so much more. Douglas, who goes by KIHMBERLIE on Instagram and Twitter, just recently got verified on Instagram after a years long struggle of trying to get noticed by labels. She has amassed 125.5K followers on her instagram and 107K followers on Twitter.

She has created sets that mimic Nike commercials, famous magazine covers, and some are simply her imagination come to life. Douglas not only has an Instagram page dedicated to her self photoshoots, but a second one, @kihm.berlie, for when she’s “behind the camera” as the insta bio reads.

I have been following Kihmberlie for a little under a year now on both Instagram and Twitter and she never fails to amaze me.

While every photoshoot she’s done in the year I’ve been following her has been amazing,

She wanted to create a shoot inspired by classical art, so laid out a tarp with a sky and some clouds printed on it, added poly-fil stuffing on top to make the clouds three dimensional, and wrapped a cloth around her private areas and laid down. She took the photos by taping her phone to her ceiling. This is one of my favorite shoots because it’s the first shoot I saw of hers, originally on Twitter, and the one that inspired me to follow her on Instagram. The shots themselves are amazing; the bird-eye view and the coloring/editing of the pictures really cements the classical art feel.

In March 2019, in one of her instagram posts, Douglas is lying in a field of green with hints of yellow holding a mirror the same size as her taking selfies. While the final shots, which she posted on March 5, are exemplary, the behind the scenes, which she posted on March 6, is what I love most about this photoshoot.

Douglas’s March 6 post’ caption reads:

“My entire shoot process from beginning to end: I knew this shoot was gonna be more difficult than usual so I practiced the night before with angles and where to put the camera. A lot of people have asked me how I this so here I go: I connected my iPhone to an app called camera connect that allows me to use my phone as a remote control for my camera (I have the @canonusa EOS Rebel T6) from there I set the camera up against my camera bag behind where I knew I was going to lay my head, after that I laid down and while looking/holding my phone in one hand I was holding the mirror with the other while balancing each corner on both of my knees so I could see the best angle to get the photo where I was completely in frame. After about an hour of cutting either my top half or bottom half off in every picture and switching the area I was shooting in about 3 times, I finally got the right angle, so I didn’t move from that spot, pressed the button on my phone (connected to my camera) for the timer, slid my phone to the side so it wasn’t in the frame and kept taking photos until I was too tired/sweaty/itchy to lay in that grass any longer”.

What I love about this, and many of her other shoots, is the behind the scenes because while with “professional” shoots (I personally classify all of Douglas’s shoots as professional — I mean look at the labor she puts in!) we only see the final product, with Douglas’s shoots she explains in detail the good, the bad, and the ugly of photoshoots.

One of my favorite things about Douglas though is her willingness to learn from her mistakes.

She’s known for asking for constructive criticism and her platforms and taking that into consideration, such as when many people requested that she show more versatility in her face during her photoshoots so she created a photoset where she demonstrated different facial poses she can do.

Douglas truly exemplifies the creative hustle mindset: she works well with others, she learns from her mistakes, but most importantly, she uplifts those she works with and her followers as well.

She inspires me to just go out and do what I love.

No matter how hard it is or how long it takes.