Do we even need a unique voice in our photography? Is having our own style really necessary? I have a few thoughts to share about this.
Every now and then, I read somewhere that if you want to grow as a photographer, you need to find your voice. It’s an essential part of your photographic journey. It’s said that to do this, you need to photograph what you’re passionate about. What motivates you. Okay, I certainly do this. Don’t we all?
I often shoot pretty scenes just because they are there. There is nothing deeper than this. I'm not trying to say anything. This photo from the Canadian Rockies was shot on film, so it's got a distinct look, but that's as far as it goes.
Voice
I interpret voice as what it is we want to say with our photography. But do we really need to say anything beyond one image at a time? And does that one image we’re about to compose have to say anything?
I’m a big believer that when we take a photo, there needs to be a point to it. I believe we should ask ourselves, what am I trying to say with this photo? Is this a photo of something, or about something? What makes this photo different from others who have shot something similar?
Hypocritically, though, sometimes there doesn’t need to be a point to a photo. I love to go out with my camera and shoot what I find interesting, unusual, or aesthetically pleasing. And I’m not sure I have a visual style either.
I do enjoy coming up with projects. Some can be shot in a day or two, while some are ongoing over a few years. This is just a way for me to focus on a theme, a collection of images that tie together, that might tell a story or simply be a collection of similar images on a topic I find interesting. Is this my voice? I don’t feel I have anything to say with these projects, or at least, I’m not trying to say anything most of the time. I just find the subject matter interesting.
Most of my travel and landscape photos are simply pretty looking scenes. The way I process them reflect the feeling from the moment, and is driven by the weather. I'm not trying to create a style.
This photo is the same location as the photo above. Again, the "style" is dictated by the conditions. I'm not trying to fit the photo into a specific personal style. This photo, from a series, was about something, not of something—solitude and isolation on Dartmoor.
Style
Developing a style is an interesting one. Too many photographers feel they need a style, and this is usually associated with a specific aesthetic. Many people buy another photographer’s color preset to give their images a certain look, which is very superficial and pointless to me. Another style choice I see a lot is to buy really fast prime lenses and shoot everything at f/1.2. The thing is, because so many photographers base their style on using a fast lens or a specific color grading technique, they’re not really carving out a unique look; they’re simply following a trend and end up looking the same as all the other sheep doing the same thing. We need to go deeper than these superficial hacks.
Two photos from two different photographers? You would think so, but no, both mine.
I do go through phases when it comes to post-processing photos. Why? Because my ideas shift about what looks good, and I like to change things up and experiment. I’m certainly not trying to develop a visual style, though. What dictates my approach to photographing something like a landscape or travel photo is the weather, how the experience makes me feel, and even where I see the photo ending up being used.
When I take my favorite images from the various editing phases I’ve gone through, there’s no consistent body of work. It looks like a random bunch of photos from different photographers. Is this a bad thing? No, I don’t think so.
The only thing I can think of when it comes to style is related to lighting. I love backlit and side-lit subjects, whether it’s a portrait, product, or landscape. Is this enough to contribute to a personal style? Possibly.
Bright, light, soft, and colourful. I love this vibe from these kind of travel photos.
Shot the same day, as the photo above, in Prague. I also like dark monochramatic contrasty images.
Conclusion
Maybe, after 40 years of being passionate about photography, I’ve yet to find my voice and style. But that’s okay, because I’m not looking for it. Or, maybe I do have a voice and style, but I’m too close to it to notice.
The most important thing for me is being authentic. I believe we should photograph things in the manner we want to—things that inspire us—not what we think others may like.
I have a quote from Cecil Beaton that I read every once in a while to keep myself on track:
Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
Discussing the creative side of photography is a good thing, something I love to do. However, we can overthink these things, and that starts to ruin the fun of photography. Worrying about style and voice is one of those things I never pay too much attention to. I honestly couldn’t care less whether I have a personal style and voice or not.
All that I know is I love creating opportunities to go off and explore and capture what interests me. It gives me joy. It’s fun. It’s really that simple.
Do you feel you have a voice and style? Are you even looking for one?
Simon is a professional photographer and video producer, with over 35 years experience. He spends his time between Canada and the UK. He has worked for major brands, organizations and publications; shooting travel, tourism, food, and lifestyle. For fun he enjoys black and white photography, with a penchant for street and landscapes.
The point is not to labor and agonize while forcing a particular style on your work. Be sensitive to your work, look at it intelligently, and find the "voice" you already have. Guitar players find their style over time as they learn. Singers don't strive to be unique, they strive to sing better. Their final voice will still be their own.
Photographers could learn from that. But because our work becomes fixed in time, as does a recording, we tend to rationalize and find "the point" later.
Post-processing sometimes becomes a parallel to fixing a bad voice or adding fake string sections in the music studio. Yes, you can make it better after the fact, but it feels a bit like cheating.
Good thoughts, forcing a style would be a bad idea. Although I disagree with post-processing as cheating, as it's part of the creative process. The type of strings you put on your guitar effects the final sound, like the final tweaks you do to colour in editing, effect the feel of the final image.
Changing the strings on a guitar is parallel to changing the lens on a camera. I wouldn't call either post-processing. What I refer to is heavy editing, to make a bad singer sound good or a bad photograph look good. Yes, modern technology lets you do it, but do you want to be "that singer" or "that photographer"?
I'm not going to judge anyone if they want to heavily edit an image. If they are enjoying the process, and learning from what they do, surely that's all that matters? Even if they go all Stock Aitkin & Waterman on it. 😆
Oh, go ahead and judge, at least in your own mind, whether you like something. We all have our own views on Art and Photography, our own thoughts on what we want to learn from our own work and from looking at the work of others, what we enjoy, what makes us think...
When a song comes on the radio that I don't like, I change the station. When I see a photograph with a heavy "Orton Effect", I move on. Judgement calls, we all do them. I'm just talking about them here in the spirit of "Finding Your Photography Voice & Style", which, if you do it thoughtfully, is a judgement of ourselves. And if we can't spill the beans about our own visual preferences and ambitions, what's there to talk about?
I would hope any sane person moves on when they see the Orton Effect! Oops, i've just judged. 😎 I do agree we should certainly be judging ourselves. Yes, good discussion, thank you!
"The type of strings you put on your guitar effects the final sound, like the final tweaks you do to colour in editing, effect the feel of the final image."
Hmmmmm. I am not sure I agree with your analogy. Editing a photo on the computer is not like selecting strings for a guitar. Changing strings on a guitar is more like choosing which film to use, or what aperture to shoot with. These are things we do BEFORE we create whatever it is we are going to create.
Editing a photo is more like recording the guitar playing, and then using a computer to change the audio file. Like when singers use AutoTone. It may not be "cheating", but it isn't wholly genuine, either.
Lol, maybe not the best analogy, I admit. What we photograph and what we want to communicate has a bearing on how we edit an image, and obviously some genres of photography, like wildlife, require less of an artistic interpretation at the editing stage than other genres.
But autotune? So Ansel Adams used autotune then, because he edited his images heavily after they were shot. What a cheat!
Adams, being a classically trained musician, often referred to the negative as the score and the print as the performance. I would liken his darkroom manipulations to the creative musicianship of a live performance.
To beat the analogy further into the ground, I'd liken heavy digital manipulation of a photograph to "cheating" via autotune and similar studio effects in music. In photography, the advent of Photoshop (and now AI) means the quality and content of the original photograph (if there even is one) has little to do with the final image.
Hey Mark I didn't believe the hype about music CD's either but often the industry powers that be often push and get or is that give what no-one ever asked. Now it's digital vs analog .. everything.
Very good article and opinion piece Simon ! Even people who clearly have a “style” cannot see it for themselves ! They are enjoying the creative process and ultimate that’s all that matters in this crazy world :-)
"Do you feel you have a voice and style? Are you even looking for one?"
Yes, I believe that I have a style. Maybe I have a voice. But the whole "voice" things sounds silly to me. As a photographer, I show things instead of saying them. Literally, a voice means sound, and sound is not the medium that photographers work in.
But no, these are things I have not set out to create.
Like you, Simon, I simply set out to shoot things in a way that looks good to me. But, when one does that for a long time, one's photos start to have a consistent look to them. Why? Well, I suppose that if we are stable human beings, then what looks good to me now will look good to me in 5 or 10 or 20 years. My sense of what looks good and what looks awkward is not something that is going to change. It will remain consistent throughout my lifetime. So, if over the course of years I continue to shoot things in a way that looks good to me, then my body of work will have a consistent, congruous aesthetic.
There are several of us wildlife photographers here in the United States who specialize in photographing Whitetail Deer. Specifically, we photograph mature bucks (males) that are at least 5 1/2 years of age, and we photograph them at the time of year when they are in "hard antler", meaning that they have antlers that have fully grown, and they have rubbed the velvet off of them. This is typically from September through the end of December.
When photographing these deer, whether in the prairies or mountainous landscapes or woodlands, one composition that I think looks especially good is a horizontal portrait. This is with the buck's head, neck, and antlers large in the frame, all the way to one side of the frame, and the center of the frame and the other side of the frame being mostly negative space.
So, after 17 years of specializing in photographing mature male Whitetail Deer in hard antler, and all the while loving the way these horizontal portraits look, I have accumulated a great number of photos that have this same look to them. I never set out to create a style. I simply shot things in a way that looked good to me. But because I am a stable human, and my tastes and passions do not shift around like the winds, what looked good to me 17 years ago is still what looks good to me now. So my body of work has a consistency to it. If someone wants to call that a "style", then go ahead and call it that. But I did not consciously set out to create a style.
As I mentioned, when someone says "voice" I interpret it as what we have to say as visual communicators. What's that saying, "a photo speaks a thousand words"?
I think something like wildlife photography is typically more documentary in its essence, rather than a pursuit of artistic expression. Therefore, if one were to pursue a distinctive style to have their work stand out, it's much more of a challenge.
I do agree, the consistency in the composition does contribute to a style or approach, and you have a wonderful set of images there Tom, thanks for sharing.
"I think something like wildlife photography is typically more documentary in its essence, rather than a pursuit of artistic expression. Therefore, if one were to pursue a distinctive style to have their work stand out, it's much more of a challenge."
Shooting wildlife in a purely documentary way can be quite challenging, as one has little to zero control over where the animals go and what they do, and most of them are terrified of humans and won't let photographers anywhere near them. So while even documentary wildlife photography is difficult, it is still rather sterile and can get a bit boring. Shooting wild animals in an aesthetically pleasing way, with some creativity involved, is, as you say, even more challenging. But that is the fun and interesting type of wildlife photography, so it is well worth facing that extra challenge.
One way we can advance beyond mere documentation is to include in the frame an expanse of habitat that the creature lives in. This can be especially compelling if we can somehow manage to show the animal rather large in the frame, but still show a broad scope of it's habitat. And if one is intentionally goes after such images, and amasses quite a few of them over the years, then that could end up being a way of developing a style.
Thanks for your replies and interaction - very much appreciated and very interesting.
I agree, showing an animal in it's environment can lead to some very powerful images indeed. Another fine set of images, thanks for sharing. I particularly love the mountain sheep. 🙂 🙌
Another timely and very thought provoking article Simon - thanks! I must confess to have spent a lot of time and done a lot of reading about finding a style and spent too long wondering if my photos lacked style or were to too simple/plain/1-dimensional/cliched etc etc. I've wondered if taking pictures because I like the scene or it looks like it will be an interesting image is too simplistic and at times I haven't enjoyed the photographs because of that. Perhaps the search is the whit elephant of photography and its simply about the enjoyment of making whatever images you like, being authentic to yourself, as you suggest. I think I needed to hear that.....
I do believe there is too much pressure about finding a style, driven by colour grading in particular, which to me is all nonsense. Searching is indeed a white elephant in photography. I come across many people who feel frustrated that they haven't found a style, and this is a shame. We don't need anything other than to enjoy the process, be authentic to our self and our beliefs, and the courageous exploration of creativity. 🙂
The point is not to labor and agonize while forcing a particular style on your work. Be sensitive to your work, look at it intelligently, and find the "voice" you already have. Guitar players find their style over time as they learn. Singers don't strive to be unique, they strive to sing better. Their final voice will still be their own.
Photographers could learn from that. But because our work becomes fixed in time, as does a recording, we tend to rationalize and find "the point" later.
Post-processing sometimes becomes a parallel to fixing a bad voice or adding fake string sections in the music studio. Yes, you can make it better after the fact, but it feels a bit like cheating.
Just thoughts...
Good thoughts, forcing a style would be a bad idea. Although I disagree with post-processing as cheating, as it's part of the creative process. The type of strings you put on your guitar effects the final sound, like the final tweaks you do to colour in editing, effect the feel of the final image.
Changing the strings on a guitar is parallel to changing the lens on a camera. I wouldn't call either post-processing. What I refer to is heavy editing, to make a bad singer sound good or a bad photograph look good. Yes, modern technology lets you do it, but do you want to be "that singer" or "that photographer"?
I'm not going to judge anyone if they want to heavily edit an image. If they are enjoying the process, and learning from what they do, surely that's all that matters? Even if they go all Stock Aitkin & Waterman on it. 😆
Oh, go ahead and judge, at least in your own mind, whether you like something. We all have our own views on Art and Photography, our own thoughts on what we want to learn from our own work and from looking at the work of others, what we enjoy, what makes us think...
When a song comes on the radio that I don't like, I change the station. When I see a photograph with a heavy "Orton Effect", I move on. Judgement calls, we all do them. I'm just talking about them here in the spirit of "Finding Your Photography Voice & Style", which, if you do it thoughtfully, is a judgement of ourselves. And if we can't spill the beans about our own visual preferences and ambitions, what's there to talk about?
Fun little discussion, thank you!
I would hope any sane person moves on when they see the Orton Effect! Oops, i've just judged. 😎 I do agree we should certainly be judging ourselves. Yes, good discussion, thank you!
"The type of strings you put on your guitar effects the final sound, like the final tweaks you do to colour in editing, effect the feel of the final image."
Hmmmmm. I am not sure I agree with your analogy. Editing a photo on the computer is not like selecting strings for a guitar. Changing strings on a guitar is more like choosing which film to use, or what aperture to shoot with. These are things we do BEFORE we create whatever it is we are going to create.
Editing a photo is more like recording the guitar playing, and then using a computer to change the audio file. Like when singers use AutoTone. It may not be "cheating", but it isn't wholly genuine, either.
Lol, maybe not the best analogy, I admit. What we photograph and what we want to communicate has a bearing on how we edit an image, and obviously some genres of photography, like wildlife, require less of an artistic interpretation at the editing stage than other genres.
But autotune? So Ansel Adams used autotune then, because he edited his images heavily after they were shot. What a cheat!
Adams, being a classically trained musician, often referred to the negative as the score and the print as the performance. I would liken his darkroom manipulations to the creative musicianship of a live performance.
To beat the analogy further into the ground, I'd liken heavy digital manipulation of a photograph to "cheating" via autotune and similar studio effects in music. In photography, the advent of Photoshop (and now AI) means the quality and content of the original photograph (if there even is one) has little to do with the final image.
Oh, don't get me started on AI now!
AI hides under your bed at night, whispering "I can make you more artistic" as you sleep...
Hey Mark I didn't believe the hype about music CD's either but often the industry powers that be often push and get or is that give what no-one ever asked. Now it's digital vs analog .. everything.
"AI hides under your bed at night, whispering 'I can make you more artistic'"
I love this line, it's given me an idea for an article, do you mind if I use it and quote you?
Go for it! :)
Very good article and opinion piece Simon ! Even people who clearly have a “style” cannot see it for themselves ! They are enjoying the creative process and ultimate that’s all that matters in this crazy world :-)
I like your attitude Darren! 🙂 Thanks for commenting.
Simon Burn, the author, asks:
"Do you feel you have a voice and style? Are you even looking for one?"
Yes, I believe that I have a style. Maybe I have a voice. But the whole "voice" things sounds silly to me. As a photographer, I show things instead of saying them. Literally, a voice means sound, and sound is not the medium that photographers work in.
But no, these are things I have not set out to create.
Like you, Simon, I simply set out to shoot things in a way that looks good to me. But, when one does that for a long time, one's photos start to have a consistent look to them. Why? Well, I suppose that if we are stable human beings, then what looks good to me now will look good to me in 5 or 10 or 20 years. My sense of what looks good and what looks awkward is not something that is going to change. It will remain consistent throughout my lifetime. So, if over the course of years I continue to shoot things in a way that looks good to me, then my body of work will have a consistent, congruous aesthetic.
There are several of us wildlife photographers here in the United States who specialize in photographing Whitetail Deer. Specifically, we photograph mature bucks (males) that are at least 5 1/2 years of age, and we photograph them at the time of year when they are in "hard antler", meaning that they have antlers that have fully grown, and they have rubbed the velvet off of them. This is typically from September through the end of December.
When photographing these deer, whether in the prairies or mountainous landscapes or woodlands, one composition that I think looks especially good is a horizontal portrait. This is with the buck's head, neck, and antlers large in the frame, all the way to one side of the frame, and the center of the frame and the other side of the frame being mostly negative space.
So, after 17 years of specializing in photographing mature male Whitetail Deer in hard antler, and all the while loving the way these horizontal portraits look, I have accumulated a great number of photos that have this same look to them. I never set out to create a style. I simply shot things in a way that looked good to me. But because I am a stable human, and my tastes and passions do not shift around like the winds, what looked good to me 17 years ago is still what looks good to me now. So my body of work has a consistency to it. If someone wants to call that a "style", then go ahead and call it that. But I did not consciously set out to create a style.
Thanks for the great comment Tom!
As I mentioned, when someone says "voice" I interpret it as what we have to say as visual communicators. What's that saying, "a photo speaks a thousand words"?
I think something like wildlife photography is typically more documentary in its essence, rather than a pursuit of artistic expression. Therefore, if one were to pursue a distinctive style to have their work stand out, it's much more of a challenge.
I do agree, the consistency in the composition does contribute to a style or approach, and you have a wonderful set of images there Tom, thanks for sharing.
Simon Burn wrote:
"I think something like wildlife photography is typically more documentary in its essence, rather than a pursuit of artistic expression. Therefore, if one were to pursue a distinctive style to have their work stand out, it's much more of a challenge."
Shooting wildlife in a purely documentary way can be quite challenging, as one has little to zero control over where the animals go and what they do, and most of them are terrified of humans and won't let photographers anywhere near them. So while even documentary wildlife photography is difficult, it is still rather sterile and can get a bit boring. Shooting wild animals in an aesthetically pleasing way, with some creativity involved, is, as you say, even more challenging. But that is the fun and interesting type of wildlife photography, so it is well worth facing that extra challenge.
One way we can advance beyond mere documentation is to include in the frame an expanse of habitat that the creature lives in. This can be especially compelling if we can somehow manage to show the animal rather large in the frame, but still show a broad scope of it's habitat. And if one is intentionally goes after such images, and amasses quite a few of them over the years, then that could end up being a way of developing a style.
Thanks for your replies and interaction - very much appreciated and very interesting.
I agree, showing an animal in it's environment can lead to some very powerful images indeed. Another fine set of images, thanks for sharing. I particularly love the mountain sheep. 🙂 🙌
Another timely and very thought provoking article Simon - thanks! I must confess to have spent a lot of time and done a lot of reading about finding a style and spent too long wondering if my photos lacked style or were to too simple/plain/1-dimensional/cliched etc etc. I've wondered if taking pictures because I like the scene or it looks like it will be an interesting image is too simplistic and at times I haven't enjoyed the photographs because of that. Perhaps the search is the whit elephant of photography and its simply about the enjoyment of making whatever images you like, being authentic to yourself, as you suggest. I think I needed to hear that.....
I do believe there is too much pressure about finding a style, driven by colour grading in particular, which to me is all nonsense. Searching is indeed a white elephant in photography. I come across many people who feel frustrated that they haven't found a style, and this is a shame. We don't need anything other than to enjoy the process, be authentic to our self and our beliefs, and the courageous exploration of creativity. 🙂