Prairie Light Images

Finding your photographic style

Photographic style is something that I always imagined other photographers had.  I never previously thought of myself as having a particular style of photography.  That was the sort of thing that the professional, dedicated artiste had that made their works so distinctive.  The kind of thing that they developed after years and years of struggling with the art and travelling to India or Outer Mongolia to find themselves.  I certainly never thought that my images had a particular style, nor did I ever expect that I would ever develop an identifiable style.  In my mind, only truly talented artists were deserving of having a style because they struggled to develop one.  I just didn’t think I could make it onto that particular team!

All I knew is that I liked photography as an avenue of artistic expression.  I have always been drawn to art, even as a child.  I loved to draw and cartoon as a kid, but tended to move away from it as adulthood and the pressures of raising a family and earning a living took priority in my life.  When I rediscovered photography in recent years, I found that I wanted to take meaningful, moving images, but never really felt that I had the eye for it and that it would take me years to develop such an eye.  The idea that I could develop a distinctive style was way out there and something that I thought would take years and thousands of photographs to discover.  I just knew that I liked to take images with my camera and that I was a bit choosy about what I wanted to capture.

A couple of months ago I had the opportunity to ask a professional photographer and instructor to review my portfolio and offer me whatever feedback was appropriate.  I was looking for some kind of benchmark to move forward from.  To that point my photographic efforts had been moved by my moods and not consciously directed to any particular type of imagery.  I was struggling trying to figure out what my preferred genre of photography was and thought an outside eye would help.  He came back with a word that resonated with me.  He said my work had a flair and tendency to the dramatic.

When I heard this it was like a light bulb had turned on.  My mother always did refer to me as a bit dramatic (as does my wife on occasion).  Subtle is definitely not my thing.  I like bold wines and food with dramatic, dominating flavours.  I like strong, energetic music (Mozart’s Requiem Mass, or any of Beethoven’s symphonies for example).  My choice in books and movies is also similarly trending to the dramatic side.  When I reviewed my portfolio I started to see that this was also a theme in many of my favourite and better images.  How about that!  I have a developing photographic style!  Way too cool!

Photographically, I am drawn to dramatic lighting, shadows and contrasts.  I am learning to use flash photography to mould the light into how I want to describe the subject.  I am moving beyond recording and now feel that I am starting to create some images.

Discovery of my emerging style has been a very liberating experience for me as a photographer.  It has given me a direction to take my photography.  I am still struggling to find a genre or niche for my photography, but I am learning that that too will come with time and experience.  I just need to get out there and keep taking pictures.

Do you have a distinctive photographic style?  If so, please participate in the poll below to tell us what it is.  How about pointing us to some examples of your style in the comments section?  I would love to see what your work is like!  Just click on the commenters’ names below to go to their web pages.

Posted on Wednesday, April 28th, 2010 at 11:43 am. Filed under: care and feeding, Photography Tags: improvement, inspiration, philosophy, Photography, style, technique RSS 2.0 feed.