Style in photography is a giant beast of a topic.
Not only is it nebulous and hard to understand for most people, but it’s also quite hard to execute on without a plan.
Throughout my career in several creative fields I’ve always seen “style” as two things:
- Your reason for creating
- How you execute on it
Number 1, your reason for creating, is super important.
Without a clear understanding of why you’re making the things you’re making, light-hearted, heavy-handed or anywhere in between, without an understanding, there will always end up being a lack of depth in your work.
And even if things do end up working out without an intentional driver, your work will become exponentially better if you just sit down for 10 minutes and ponder about your why.
It’s pretty simple, if you can answer these 3 simple questions with decent answers, you’re well on your way to conquering your mind and your photographic goals.
- Why do you take photographs?
- What do you actually photograph?
- How does what you photograph represent you?
Now, as for the other half of style - how you actually manifest those answers - well, in photography, I consider the execution to be the aesthetic side of “style”.
How you represent your aesthetic is important too, because it shows the world who you are and what you believe in.
To take a step forward into really developing your aesthetic, one big portion has to do with colour.
I sat down the other week with Adobe to talk about how to get started with a colour palette in Photoshop, and how you can start to bring in consistent colours into all your images in Lightroom to start creating a visual style that represents you.
Check out the video below.
Also consider reading my article on "How to find your style in Photography"
