How do you find your own style?

Part of arriving as a photographer is having a style of your own.

The photographers whose work I admire, have a definite style, their work speaks with a voice that lets you know it is their work.

Part of my style today is humor.

If I listen to a minuet by Haydn or Mozart or Beethoven, I can usually tell who the composer was. If you listen to Beethoven’s early work you see that it is less emotional and not so much like Beethoven as his later work. You might also notice that Beethoven’s early work sounds a little like Haydn. Well, that makes sense; Beethoven studied under Haydn and he knew his work well.

Each of us develops our style under the influence of those around us and we tend to make art that is like our contemporaries. At least at in the beginning, we are destined to emulate other people. To emerge with a style of your own, you have to learn the existing rules, master them and then figure out which ones matter to you and which ones can be bent or changed.

Style happens and evolves over time, both historically and personally. Be patient. You won’t go from a shutter bug who just figured out how to frame a subject to a highly polished artist over night. It will take years, maybe longer. I am sure the great masters like David of the Neo-classic era or Fragonard of the Rococo era would have been shocked by the evolution of style if they saw the work of Picaso. Just like that shift in style took a century or so, your personal style will take time to emerge and evolve.

Another aspect of my style is drama.

Each of the masters Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven have a distinct style and sound even though they are all prime examples of the classic period (a short and specific artistic era), they each sound unique.  If I were to listen to a piano trio or an opera aria, or a string quartet of Mozart, they would all sound like Mozart.  Even when the mood of each piece would also be radically different, they would each sound like Mozart.

Why?

Well, this is not my graduate music history class so we won’t get to in depth about the why on Mozart. But, he started performing music for dukes and queens at age 3 and composing at age 5. He traveled the world of Europe extensively and listened to the music of many cultures. The more he wrote, and listened, the more his personality was able to grab on to the bits and pieces of musical expression and put them on paper.

I am still trying to find my style.

Developing a style in any art, such as photography takes time, it takes experimentation, it takes revision and practice. It takes mistake after mistake. For a photographer that means looking carefully at the work of many other great masters. Copying the great work, emulating others and then keeping the parts that speak to you. It means taking many many photographs and finding what you like best. If you care about it, seeing what your audience likes, or which audience wants to see your art.

You may need to develop your style many times. Take a look at the music of Beethoven. He was a great example of learning a style over and over. He did not start out each genre of music composition at the same time in his life. Each genre that he worked in shows a learning period, a developmental period, and a mastery period. Even when he was already very accomplished in one area, when he started a new way genre of expression, he would go through the same steps of learning artistic expression. Even when his composing toolbox was the toolbox of a grand master.

Photographers can learn a lot about style from artists of many disciplines. We can learn from the painter, the dancer, the actor, the poet, the musician and many others. Part of developing style is getting your head full of ideas and playing with them. Those ideas can come from a grand array of sources.

The end of it is you need to play with life and shoot, and then do it again and again. Play, shoot, play, shoot.