This year, alongside experimenting more with black and white images, I’m continuing to gently tune my photographic style.

Why does style matter?

When not working to a brief or a client’s expectations, style becomes a thing that helps to hold your work together. It’s what gives your public portfolio some consistency - a common thread between the person looking at the images and the person taking them. Without it, there’s no real handle to grab onto. No sense of what ties the work together. Perhaps counter-intuitively, a little constraint can also help to boost creativity rather than hinder it.

Of course, I could just take photos I like and hope others like them too. And to some extent, that’s what I do. But can’t simply fling my entire photo library at the wall and see what sticks. Photography is still an artistic endeavour (despite what some AI techies might suggest), and strong bodies of work usually sit within some sort of framework. Landscape, portraiture, street photography, etc, are all underpinned by harder-to-define foundations - the ‘special sauce’ that makes an image recognisably someone’s. From Ansel Adams to James Popsys, style doesn’t just happen — it’s developed, consciously or otherwise over time and thousands of photos. I’m still getting there.

Developing stylistically

In truth, it feels like I’ve been leading a bit of a double life as I’ve developed my own style.

Behind the lens, I’m learning all the time. My design background gives me a solid grounding in composition and balance. Tone and colour are areas I’m exploring more deeply. My Fujifilm kit has its quirks, but it produces colours I enjoy, even if I’m occasionally tempted by the blank-er canvas of full-frame Sony or Canon files. I tend towards clean, natural, slightly warm landscape images, often cropped to 16:9 (a widescreen format). And given how rare sunlight can be in Scotland, I’m quite happy to let it take centre stage when it appears. Letting nature shine.

In front of the computer screen, I’ve drawn on past experience in product management, design and tech to shape my website, branding and my small range of merchandise. I’m comfortable with the behind-the-scenes work — making print ordering as simple as possible, keeping things clean and understated, favouring neutral tones and conservative typography. I also like pairing images with a bit of storytelling here on the blog. Video may come one day, but for now I’m more tempted by audio, as a long-time audiobook listener.

What I’m aiming to do is bring these strands together into something more cohesive. In a previous blog, I described how I’ve begun to rationalise my web site - continually trimming the portfolio and shop down to images that not only resonate with me, but also sit well together. That means removing outliers, even if I’m fond of them or the stories behind them. They’re still there in the background and available as prints if wanted, but they’re no longer in the shop window. This website, though built originally from a Squarespace template, is also becoming more personalised as I drift away from the starting point. I also hope to develop and extend my own photography presets, not as rigid rules for development, but as a guiding hand towards stylistic consistency.

Currency

I’ve watched many photography YouTube videos, encouraging photographers to be true to themselves and to avoid chasing social media ‘likes’. I tend to agree; I love my photography and all it entails, and I’d be foolish to compromise that for the fairly meaningless currency of clicks and likes, especially knowing that someone higher up the food chain certainly is making real money from them. It’s great to connect and occasionally to receive a little encouragement though. For some reason, actually making money from landscape photography seems less acceptable(?) than, say wedding photography, or product photography. Perhaps it’s the ‘push’ rather than the ‘pull’ of a commission? But it would be disingenuous of me to pretend that I’m on this journey purely for love. Like everyone else, I need to make a living too.

Ultimately of course, style without substance is worth very little at all - I really do need to get out shooting, and I have some new kit to play with - more about that next time...

Style

Inspiration

One year