What's your photography style?
Trying to be Creative #37
I’ve always been a big believer that there’s no point in doing photography if we can’t enjoy it. Photography becomes much harder than it should be once that joy is lost.
Recently, I was thinking about what my photography style is and I remember when I started photography. I wanted to find my style back then and spent a lot of time on content that was supposed to teach me how to find it.
Spoiler alert: I didn’t find it then and to be honest, I’m still not sure I’ve found it now.
So many of us try to fit our photography into a box (I’m super guilty of this) and I don’t know why we do it. I think it has something to do with wanting to be recognized for our work and maybe it’s easier once we can put ourselves into a category. However, I think it makes photography less fun overall and hard to enjoy.
I think my own work is mostly forgettable. That’s because, for the most part, and especially in the last 2 years, I’ve focused more on taking photos of things I’m interested in regardless of genre or trends. I used to be stressed out over defining my photography in the past, but not as much nowadays.
And speaking of styles, it also applies to how we edit our photos. Am I a photographer that favors high-contrast photos or do I like them soft and dreamy? Colors or black and white? Super sharp or soft? I don’t think any of that matters. I try to edit differently for each photo.
Maybe I’ll never be able to describe my photography style. Maybe it should be left to the people who view our work. All we need to do is keep taking photos of what we find interesting and hope it somehow resonates with someone out there, photography style or not.
What do you think about all of this?
Thanks for reading this far.
Keep making photos and experimenting. Speaking of which, below are some photos from the past few weeks.
See you February 29.
x
ash.
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Great topic! I don't feel I have a specific style, simply because I like to photograph different things, styles, genres whatever you call it. Does make it difficult though to see the forest for the trees, to make sense of all my photographs when I look at them on my screen. What's the connection? Is there a story? Does it matter?! 🙂
Hey Ash - good post! I’m with you about shooting what you want to and enjoying that process. It feels to me that you can’t force a style - or will it to happen. It emerges overtime and is the combined product of how you see the world, what interests you, how you frame your compositions, how you edit, and how you display/share your images. I’m with you that the viewer may well see ‘your style’ even if you can’t.