Photography Style

The genesis of this post was way back in early July, I was on the road to Texas and was chatting with a blogger friend about our respective Project365s.  She opened my eyes to the idea of different photography styles, something I hadn’t really thought about.  Obviously, there are different types of photographers, especially professional ones.  There are those who specialize in weddings, or sporting events, or portraits, or fashion, or whatever.  This is more about style, how someone sees something, not what they see.

Those of you who are familiar with the HNT piece of the blogosphere are probably familiar with 13messages, Vixen, and Emmy.  And if you’re not, you should be, they’re all great photographers!  Anyway, I can’t quite put into works why, but their photographs have a distinctive style to me, something that makes their photographs instantly recognizable as their own.

Style seems to be something that is less something that someone works towards and more something that they discover, that seems to be the case for me.  I’ve browsed the collections of many different photographers and thought “wow, I’d like to take pictures like that!”, but can’t.  Not because of a lack of technical skill or artistic inspiration, but because that’s not my style, literally.

I’ve been gaining a sense of what types of photography appeals to me the most.  Looking back just at the last week of photographs from my Project365, along with a few purposefully “artistic” ones there are a number that are just “a day in the life of Hubman”, shown in my style.  Whatever that is…

I did a little reading on photography style and came across a couple of pieces of good advice

• Take lots of pictures, spontaneous and planned (that’s part of why I’m doing this Project365)
• Look at others work for inspiration
• Challenge yourself, look for new ways to photograph the same old thing
• Experiment with categories, landscapes, portraits, street, nature, etc

So far, I think I’ve been doing pretty good at following this advice, there is certainly an eclectic variation in categories in the past 284 days and my technical skills are gotten much better compared to January, when I was shooting everything in auto mode.

When Veronica and I were in NYC 2 weekends ago we went to an exhibit of photographs by Lee Friedlander at the Whitney Museum of American Art.  Every one of his photographs on display, 150+ of them, was taken from the perspective of his car as he traveled around the country.  Seeing this exhibit got me thinking about themes for my Project365 and ways to challenge myself.  As it so happens, today’s picture was taken using my 50mm prime lens (that’s a lens with a fixed focal length ie doesn’t zoom), and just for the hell of it I’m going to leave the prime lens on my camera all week and put away from zoom lens.  Not having the ability to zoom in or out will certainly challenge my image composition skills!

In my next life, or when I win the Lotto and become independently wealthy, I want to be a documentary photographer or photojournalist, that could be fun.

Thanks for reading

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