Hi everyone. Today I wanted to talk to you about having a consistent style across your work, how it happens, and why it happens.
First off what is a consistent style? well it’s when your work has a similar look, feel, mood, etc. lots of people starting off in photography will take photographs of anything and everything. Which is great because it’s fun! There’s no need to limit your work to one specific genre, always create what you want. But right now I believe in consistency to build mastery, you can be a jack of all trades or master of one, there’s no right or wrong answer, just choices.
I got my style in photography through choosing to take street photographs all the time, as I mentioned in my earlier blog post. it’s just what inspires me the most out of every possible thing that I have the option of photographing. There’s nothing more enjoyable for me than taking images that show the people, and life around me, I just love candid street photographs, there’s something special about seeing life as-it-is-lived that just intrigues me to no end.
When I went to photography school I was taught certain techniques on how to post process my photos, some of the suggestions I liked, and some I didn’t, but one thing that always stuck with me was images with contrast almost always look better than images that don’t. if you look at any great photograph there’s almost always a good amount of contrast in the image. Another technique that really stuck with me was to have as little pure white and as little pure black as possible. I remember I showed one of my images to my instructor and he said it’s fine, but look at how the shadows are all black, there could be detail there. And when he edited the photo he made the image look almost exactly the same in terms of contrast, but he processed the image so that you could actually see the detail in the shadow areas. I was surprised at first at how he did it, but with a little more practice I learned how to pull it off every time. I hate looking at printed images and seeing pure black and white, what I love is when there’s contrast, but lots of different shades of grey, when there’s little bits of detail in the dark shadow areas it rewards viewers that take a closer look at the image, and really takes in every detail.
I don’t know why other people have the style that they do, but I gained mine through a natural process of knowing what I want to see in an image, and after awhile (about three years) all of my images started to look similar, it’s just what I think looks good, I found what I like and I think my images are almost always going to be high contrast in black and white, but you never know what’ll happen.
as always I hope you enjoyed these random thoughts of mine.
-Jeremy