Whether consciously or subconsciously I have been in pursuit of my own photography style ever since I bought my first DSLR about 13 years ago. Eighty-thousand or so digital images later I am no closer to defining my own photography style !
Or am I ?
I hope you can follow my ramblings enough to get as far through this story as the new set of images that appear below.
If you’ve been following me on my photography journey on this photoblog, you’ll be aware that I have been semi-housebound for quite a few months now, and have only had occasional opportunities to get out and capture new images.
But it hasn’t been all bad being stuck inside. It has given me the opportunity to go through those 80,000-odd images, print quite a lot of them out, and review those “hard copies” looking for clues, so to speak, in pursuit of my own photography style.
As I write this I think it may have worked for me.
Ramblings On In Pursuit Of My Own Photography Style
As I reviewed my older photographs – many of which have never seen the light of day here – I noticed that well over 75% of my images were just plain old everyday photos. Even my “travel” photos taken while motor-homing around New Zealand were of the mundane.
I had been taking photographs of mundane stuff that you and I see every day but rarely take notice of. And it struck me that if I took the time to shoot images of all those mundane things, I had obviously been taking notice of them.
Perhaps the mundane is better described as a genre of photography – or even a sub-genre of street photography, or urban photography, or maybe better still – a sub-genre of outdoor photography.
William Egglestone and Steven Shore are acknowledged masters of the mundane !
But the question I ask myself is this – “Is it possible to photograph the mundane without copying or mimicking Eggleston and Shore and others?”.
And my answer to myself is this – “Yes, of course it’s possible because the mundane belongs to each and everyone of us”.
But in pursuit of my own photography style I got myself hung up on the genre aspect of the mundane.
After much thought about the matter I decided that there is no reason why my style should not be a combination of genre and post-processing.
Again after post processing a handful of the aforementioned selected images in different ways (mostly global processing), I arrived at a preset recipe that I really like; a recipe that I can easily tweak to make work for individual images.
Another thing I noticed as I reviewed my older photos in pursuit of my own photography style is that a large number of photographs aslo included signs of various sorts. So I have made “Signs” a theme for this selection of photographs.
