Finding Your Photographic Style. It’s a tricky one! It will not take hours, days, weeks or even months. It will take years and there is no shortcut. In Part 1 we will look at the photo city traders and in Part 2 we will go into detail on how to find your photographic style.
Part 1 City Traders.
Taken in Central London in the City Area. This is straight out of camera, no cropping, some sliders and that’s it. The lights in a fan formation leaping out of the window were the first thing that caught my eye, and secondly the busy street scene reflected with the very bright building adding some extra contrast. Two sets of leading lines and we have I would say three layers going on here. It’s a photo that could have been taken as is, but it needed a human element to add the finishing touch. Three City Trader types suddenly turned up out of the blue and the exposure makes them look in silhouette but you can just make out some detail in the shadows but not enough to identify them. Job Done.
As this blog post is primarily focused on “Photographic Style”, this photo “City Traders” is pretty much the way my photographic style is heading. Three other similar photos with this high contrast moody, dramatic and crunchy look including St Pauls, Alley and Vauxhall .
It takes time to arrive at your Photographic Style, maybe years, but those four photos show an emerging style that will probably evolve further over time….. which brings us nicely onto Part 2.
Part 2 Finding Your Photographic Style
When you take pictures you don’t want your pictures to look like everybody else’s, photos that stand out and have a certain signature will always be favoured over the same old same old also rans. These are the photos that have a certain style infused into them which makes them instantly recognisable as taken by a certain photographer. Achieve that and you have found your own photographic style.
BUT what is your photographic style and how do you find it? This is just my personal take on this topic, it differs from the accepted wisdom out there. Make of it what you will.
Where I stand on this is quite simple your photographic style is HOW YOU SEE THE WORLD and COMES FROM WITHIN and then how that is transferred into the finished article as in photo, painting, music or whatever. It’s your own personality and character, your DNA, your fingerprint creating a UNIQUE thing staring back at you with every photo you take.
What it isn’t, is what sort of camera you use, film or digital, whether you shoot black and white or colour, using Instagram filters or combinations of them, cranking your colour settings on vivid to max neon setting. Those are a “look” but the original contents of the photo remain unchanged. These don’t affect how you see things originally.
What affects how you see things are your personality, your life experiences. Using a 24mm lens will change how you see things compared to a 50mm or 135mm, not the camera body itself. If you are 5ft tall you will have a completely different perspective on the world to someone who is 6ft 4. How you shoot will affect your style, are you aggressive and invasive or are you unobtrusive and fly on the wall type. Do you shoot at eye level or from the hip. From the distance or ultra close up. All this will greatly affect your style and the end result.
Daido Moriyama has a unique style. His genre is Street Photography but that is not his style. His photographic style is characterized by how he invented a visual language, rejecting the pursuit of technical precision in favour of grainy, blurry and high contrast images, produced by a compact camera which are snapshots with dark and harsh spotlighting and mysterious backgrounds.
Some say his style starts AFTER he has taken the photo in the post processing and printing stage, others say it’s in camera, others a mixture of the two. But a Daido photo is a Daido photo, colour or black and white, it’s an easily recognisable style that even 60 years later stands out and has stood the test of time.
I would say style comes from WITHIN and look is external factors that are applied to give the final result. That’s my take on it, others may disagree.
Another modern day example is Alan Schaller went from musician to a photographer and pretty quickly thanks to his street photographer girlfriend at the time and decided Street Photography was his genre, Black and White was his medium and look and a 24mm lens was the focal length that would dictate how he sees the world. The rest as they say is history. You see an Alan Schaller photo you , know he took it. STYLE! 1 Million followers on Instagram whichever way you cut it, is proof that style will elevate your work into the stratosphere.
How do you find your style. My advice is know yourself, find your genre that reflects yourself and fits your personality, look at other work that seriously RESONATES with you past and present in all genres, look for common factors and then get out there and shoot like a wild thing.
It takes time, probably years but after thousands maybe tens of thousands of photos, the mist will clear, something will emerge and you will one day take a photo that stops you dead in your tracks and you will see that this is the photo I have been trying to take all this time that is “ME” Then start shooting to get more photos just like that again and again in different situations. You are now in the beginning stages of finding your style….just the beginning and a portfolio of your work is starting to emerge.
There are videos out there that give shortcuts or “hacks” to this. I haven’t watched them, but the ones below I recommend will open a door and they all agree it takes time. It’s not an overnight thing, but once you have found your genre, look and STYLE, it forms the very foundation of your work and says who you are, what you are trying to say and how you see the world in your own UNIQUE way. It will elevate your work above the also rans and may inspire others which I think is the ultimate accolade.
Recommended Videos. These are videos I have personally watched on my photographic journey. They are very dry and one on one but they will give you a kick in the right direction to get you started on your STYLE journey.
VIDEO: Sean Tucker on Photographic Style Fellow London Photographer who does Street and Portraiture
VIDEO: Scott French on Photographic Style. Architecture Photographer
VIDEO: Bruce Gilden in Take It or Leave It by VICE Master Street Photographer. Some ideas to get your creative juices going which get pulled to shreds by Mr Flash in Your Face himself
PAVEMENT PULSE 