I want to talk about developing your own personal style in photography. What is your own personal style? You have it if you have effective communication of your own experience through your art. It means that what you put out there in your art is not just replicating what other people have done but adding something of yourself in it.
You have to shoot a lot to develop a style. If you don’t take a lot of shots, you won’t internalize the basic mechanisms of photography so that you can go on to express what you see in a unique way. So, taking your camera out every chance you get and shooting a lot is certainly required.
But that’s really not the only thing. You can take a lot of photos and not develop too much. That’s absolutely true, you know. You have to do more than just take hundreds of pictures. You have to analyze them, and see what you like and what you don’t like about them. Most importantly, you have to bring your mind back to the scene and ask yourself if your photo really represents what you saw and felt about the scene. And, if for some reason you don’t feel anything about a scene, then you can’t really produce outstanding photographs, only shots that might follow the so-called rules of composition.
And this analysis is not automatic. You don’t just go out there and shoot and look at your shots and automatically know, because you don’t even know yourself fully—nobody does. So you have to discover yourself through photography. That’s even true if you know yourself very well in other art forms. Let’s say you’re a pianist and you can really express yourself through music. That doesn’t mean you’ll know yourself through photography. The cool part of art is that you can discover yourself again and again.
Really recognizing what you like in photography requires a bit of courage, too. You must state honestly what you like and what you don’t like. That’s hard to do, even to yourself. Part of that is trends. Every genre of photography and indeed every domain of art has trends that are hard to go against. And you’ll really have to go against them. That’s true, because a set of trends can never define who you are. You have to do that.
Bird photography and my own style
Let’s take bird photography. There are so many different trends in bird photography! But there are some that don’t interest me much. For example, many people like complicated shots taken of birds taking off from a branch using a new feature in some cameras that is sometimes called “pro-capture”.
But a lot of the results are rather awkward. For a photo like that to be interesting it still has to have good light and good composition. And in the bird photography world, a lot of people praise such photos even when composition is lacking, just because it’s a sharp capture of a bird taking off from a branch.
That’s not surprising because bird photography has that technical aspect of hunting that goes beyond photography, but I’m not really interested in that aspect. A sharp shot of a fast species may be technically hard to capture, but it doesn’t necessarily make for a nice photo. That’s true with birds in flight also. I personally love taking birds in flight but again, I think such photos still have to have great composition or they’re not interesting.
There’s also something else that gets a ton of attention in animal photography: humour. If you’ve got a shot of an animal doing something that looks funny or cute, it will get a lot of extra attention. And of course, I find it funny when animals do funny things, too. But what I don’t like popularizing that, because I believe in other people it tends to emphasize the human-centric theme of animals as entertainment. So I prefer not to incorporate humour in my wildlife photography.
Closing Remarks
So you see, there are trends that you’ll sometimes have to ignore if you want to truly make your own style. Preference also comes in: you know, in wildlife photography, a lot of people especially enjoy “cute” photos. Cute photos will get a lot of attention, but they don’t spark my interest that much. I still can love a cute photo, but they don’t spark my interest too much in terms of my own photography unless I can also find a good composition that goes with it.
What I’m saying is this: developing your own style sounds straightforward, but when you’re in the photography world, it may not be so straightforward because at some point, you’ll want your work recognized and it’s hard not to go for the obvious stuff that gets the attention of others. But if you want to develop your own style, you’ll really have to do that sometimes.
There are so many other aspects to developing your own style, but a lot of it simply comes down to exploring photography with respect to understanding yourself. Keep learning, keep shooting, and don’t lose the courage to be yourself. That doesn’t mean not accepting critique: critique is important because your message after all is meant to be seen by others, and if your message is not getting through, it’s because you are missing something.
Missing something usually means that you have some extra information about your photo that allows you to understand it, but it doesn’t allow others to understand it. That happens in music too. If you have a strong idea of how a piece of music should be played, when you’re playing the instrument, the music in your head will distract you from what you’re actually doing and you won’t get your feelings across.
The same thing happens in photography. If you are very emotional and attached to a scene, those emotions will make you see your photo in a different way. I still have my own blocks sometimes and I let my emotions take over with a shot. Your emotions will add to the photo to make it seem greater than it is, and your emotions will hide the problems in your photo. So, learn to see and experience your work through your work, rather than through your memories of the scene. Once you do that, you’ll see much more clearly what you need to do to transmit the message more effectively.