Defining Style

I have just completed a Digital Photography I course this past week. Actually the course ends tomorrow evening, but I am traveling on family matters this weekend. So, I’ll miss the last class.

The course was one of the better investments of time and money that I have made in recent years. Each Monday provided me with “ah-ha moments” and areas of being challenged. The instructor said he would engage the right side of our brains, and he did. I look at the world differently now. This means, I am actually taking time to look at it; not just rush through it. I look at the world through a camera lens in hopes of finding art. 

A few weeks ago there was a discussion about style. Find your style. What is it about a photograph that says, that it is your photograph? Think Ansel Adams. When you see a black and white landscape, you immediately think of Ansel Adams. In truth, it may be that someone else shot the photograph, but you first think of Adams. That was his style, his genre; and that is what he is known for.

I made a note in my class journal. “What is your style? Develop your style. What is it about my photographs that will define them as my photographs.” That is a question.

Finding my style will be like like finding my voice, but only with the camera. It is like a writer experimenting with words or a painter trying a different brush. It is that thing that makes one unique, causing one artist to be distinguished from another.

I read through my notes and think. I look at the work I produced for class. Is there something there? I know that I enjoy shooting landscapes. I like cityscapes. I am not that good at photographing people. This comes from being an introvert and shying away from people I don’t know. What abstracts I shot I enjoyed. And I had a little success with black and white (still a bit of work to do there though). There is a profile emerging.

Can I tell a compelling story with a black and white landscape? Can I marry that with my flirtation with high dynamic range processing? Maybe.

This past weekend Gerrie and I spent a few hours on the loop trail at local state park. We actually didn’t make it too far on the trail. The sky was overcast so shooting a broad vista of the changing colors would not work. We were forced to look at the trail; look at our feet. What was there? Was there anything interesting? What we saw was texture. A marvelous variety of texture that God laid before us. 

It isn’t Ansel Adams. It isn’t remotely close.

But it is a beginning perhaps.

Legacy is something that I’ll explore as time goes on. But this space, this blog, is part of the legacy that I wish to leave for my children and my grandchildren. For them, the photographs that I hope to make are simply other expressions of how I see the world. They help to chronicle how I lived my life. My wish is that after I have left this life, that they will look at photograph or a drawing and be able to know straight away that “Papa took that picture” or “Dad drew that.” They’d just know and, they may even be a little bit proud.

That is my wish at least.