COMPOSITION - Finding your ‘style’

To get an idea as to how your personal shooting ‘style’ is evolving, you can try the following method. It helped me when I was first starting out, as I really had no idea where I was going, but I knew I was passionate to learn. So every time I went out with my camera capturing frames in general, I monitored what I had taken when I got home. I found that I had included these three categories amongst others .....

A. THE RECORD - Images I had taken because of the subject’s history, or a location I may never revisit and I wanted to remember it.
So as a record, although it can be, it does not necessarily have to be creative. Meaning you don’t need to spend too much time
thinking about it. This is an image that you may file away somewhere until later …..hmmm.

B. PERSONAL - Images of myself, friends or family doing stuff, having fun. They were personal visual memories, often prompted by
friends and family. As such they didn’t need to be creative.

C. CREATIVE - These were moments I was drawn to, I didn’t need to know why. The way the light changed an object, or something
interesting or funny occurred and I was there to capture it. In fact I did not know why I had to capture it and it didn’t matter.
This is where you will start to see your style.
On your computer create three folders with the above names, and when you edit your shoot place each image in its respective folder.
If you do this over many different shoots you will know what folder it will end up in as you take the shot. 

Every now and then have a look at the images in the last folder C. You will start to see something that unites them all. It is your inner self. Meaning they are moments that resonated with you ONLY, yet you may have been unaware of why. You might see sadness, dualism, joy, anything. The point is that when you see them all together you may recognise what you are drawn to. It’s quite revealling and you may or may not accept what you see at first, but it is there within you. 
You can put to one side the other two folders as you know what they are for. We are here to discover your style. Because you are seeing your inner responses for the first time in folder C, only you will know the subconscious motive of why you captured them.

I used this same system back in the day when I used colour slide film, viewed on a Lightbox. Then I applied the same thinking to my digital files.

They are yours and yours alone. 

Although I have shown the image above of the sea wall (1) at Burnham-on-Sea to people before, I don’t think anyone has guessed what it may represent. I had a reason, and yes it’s deep!, yet it’s totally up for interpretation and that’s the beauty of imagery really. There are secrets locked inside each frame that only you will know.  You can let it be known, or you can sit back and note the myriad meanings that others see in your work.

In the image of the two kids playing in the water, (2) my reaction was that they were going be caught by the incoming tide, but they had an escape - the stairs. So the eye moves in a circular motion here, the answer is visible, they will be safe. Move around your frame until you find something to juxtapose the action or inference if not, move on. The visual cues you add to your composition and how you place them govern the outcome to a certain degree. The Tararua Ranges image (3) has only one obvious caption - Windpower.

All photography and text © Jon Davison 2023

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